journal
of science education
Think it Over
This section of Resonance presents thought-provoking questions, and discusses answers a few months later. Readers are invited to send new questions, solutions to old ones and comments, to ‘Think It Over’, Resonance, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore 560 080. Items illustrating ideas and concepts will generally be chosen
On Rectangling a Square
Is it possible to cut a square into a finite number of
pieces and
then rejoin the pieces to form a rectangle of greater area?
This looks impossible, yet the following scheme seems to do it.
We take a 8 x 8 square, dissect it as shown in Figure 1,
then rejoin the pieces to get a 5 x 13 rectangle. It
would appear that an extra unit of area has been created out of
nothing. How is this possible?
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