We’ve been looking at dissection puzzles, where we cut an object into pieces, and rearrange them. Here we’ll examine a mystery posed by two different puzzles, each of which seems to change the area by rearranging the pieces. The answer combines the marvelous Fibonacci numbers and [spoiler alert!] how easily we misjudge areas.
Last week we looked at a puzzle about cutting a square cake into equal pieces. Here we will be trying to cut a rectangle into two pieces and rearranging them to make a different rectangle. Three of the questions we’ll look at came within two weeks in 2001, but we’ll take them in a logical …
For the next couple weeks, we’ll look at a few “dissection problems”, which involve cutting a shape in various ways. Here, we look at what turns out to be a simple problem, though it seems at first that it would be complicated: dividing a cake into pieces with the same amount of cake and the …