When I had first learned that the classical dissection from Dudney (1902), transforming
a square into a (equilateral) triangle, is a hinged one (just swing the parts over),
I immediately knew I had to actually build it! Now, one year later, here is the result:
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This "puzzle" can be "solved" by one hand! :-)
1. start like this (holding the small triangle)
2. turn over the small triangle, s.t. the other pieces fall down.
3. now turn back and further, until the pieces form a triangle!
And now as a brain teaser
My company decided to print its own version of this dissection puzzle as a gift,
with different printing on the top and bottom sides: the company
logo and a special triangular logo for an initiative of one of our groups.
Note how the triangular logo was repeated 16 times and skewed around
the triangular piece, such that most corners of the pieces seem to be in the
center of a colored hexagon (or projected cube, as you see it).
This makes the pieces fit nicely together also for the square!
It turned out that distinguishing top and bottom sides makes solving
the puzzle for many people very easy. So if you really want to print a
challenging version yourself, top and bottom sides should not be distinguishable.
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Last modified: April 21 2003
