English

Grationality, With a Spoon

History and Overview 2025-08-13 v1

Abstract

The introduction of Grationality at a 2025 sectional meeting of the Mathematical Association of America installed a handle on a concept akin to rationality of numbers, but in a geometric context. A nice nn-gon was defined to be a regular nn-gon with side lengths that are natural numbers, and a number nn was defined to be grational if and only if there exists a nice nn-gon such that its area equals the sum of areas of nn congruent nice nn-gons. This paper shows several examples of grational and non-grational numbers, followed by theorems about how the grationality of a number relates to its divisibility. Proofs of these theorems do not use high-powered tools, but rely on geometric constructions, proportional reasoning, tiling, dissection, the Carpets Theorem, and proof by descent. In keeping with this simplicity, a.k.a. "doing math with a spoon," images are heavily leveraged. The benefits of choosing simplistic tools are discussed.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.08267,
  title  = {Grationality, With a Spoon},
  author = {L. Jeneva Clark},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.08267},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

21 pages, 40 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:44:50.077Z