Dissection Puzzles
Four ways of triangle to hexagon
After playing around with "dissections" and finding out the first
principle involved ("shearing"), I designed my own dissection puzzle:
Try to reassemble the parts below to
a hexagon! Click the triangles to get a larger copy for printing.
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But shouldn't there be a more symmetric solution?
After two weeks I've finally found the following:
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Again the seven pieces can be rearranged to a regular hexagon. This
puzzle is based on two different tilings!
Greg Frederickson
(see the links to his books about dissections below) showed me
another solution with 3-fold rotational symmetry!
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Again seven pieces. This dissection can even be generalized to any {p}->{2p}!
I was very surprised to find on the Internet another dissection
(originally by Harry Lindgren) with only 5 pieces!
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Also these five pieces can be rearranged to a regular hexagon!
Dissection links
My interest in dissection puzzles was raised by
a nice set
of dissection puzzles of
Robert Fathauer's www.tesselations.com.
They also have
a very beautiful puzzle online.
Further links:
Homepage |
math page |
Dudney's classical square-to-triangle as a wooden construction |
partially hinged dissection of dedecagon to square
Last modified: Dec 29, 2007
