The tangram is a dissection puzzle consisting of seven flat polygons, called tans, which are put together to form shapes. The objective is to replicate a pattern generally found in a puzzle book using all seven pieces without overlap. Alternatively the tans can be used to create original minimalist designs that are either appreciated for their inherent aesthetic merits or as the basis for challenging others to replicate its outline. It is reputed to have been invented in China sometime around the late 18th century and then carried over to America and Europe by trading ships shortly after. It became very popular in Europe for a time, and then again during World War I. It is one of the most widely recognized dissection puzzles in the world and has been used for various purposes including amusement, art, and education.
A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of geometries.
Discrete geometry and combinatorial geometry are branches of geometry that study combinatorial properties and constructive methods of discrete geometric objects. Most questions in discrete geometry involve finite or discrete sets of basic geometric objects, such as points, lines, planes, circles, spheres, polygons, and so forth. The subject focuses on the combinatorial properties of these objects, such as how they intersect one another, or how they may be arranged to cover a larger object.
In geometry, an arrangement of lines is the subdivision of the plane formed by a collection of lines. Problems of counting the features of arrangements have been studied in discrete geometry, and computational geometers have found algorithms for the efficient construction of arrangements.
Erik D. Demaine is a Canadian-American professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former child prodigy.
In geometry, a simple polygon is a polygon that does not intersect itself and has no holes. That is, it is a piecewise-linear Jordan curve consisting of finitely many line segments. These polygons include as special cases the convex polygons, star-shaped polygons, and monotone polygons.
In geometry, a net of a polyhedron is an arrangement of non-overlapping edge-joined polygons in the plane which can be folded to become the faces of the polyhedron. Polyhedral nets are a useful aid to the study of polyhedra and solid geometry in general, as they allow for physical models of polyhedra to be constructed from material such as thin cardboard.
The art gallery problem or museum problem is a well-studied visibility problem in computational geometry. It originates from the following real-world problem:
"In an art gallery, what is the minimum number of guards who together can observe the whole gallery?"
A dissection puzzle, also called a transformation puzzle or Richter puzzle, is a tiling puzzle where a set of pieces can be assembled in different ways to produce two or more distinct geometric shapes. The creation of new dissection puzzles is also considered to be a type of dissection puzzle. Puzzles may include various restraints, such as hinged pieces, pieces that can fold, or pieces that can twist. Creators of new dissection puzzles emphasize using a minimum number of pieces, or creating novel situations, such as ensuring that every piece connects to another with a hinge.
In geometry, a dissection problem is the problem of partitioning a geometric figure into smaller pieces that may be rearranged into a new figure of equal content. In this context, the partitioning is called simply a dissection. It is usually required that the dissection use only a finite number of pieces. Additionally, to avoid set-theoretic issues related to the Banach–Tarski paradox and Tarski's circle-squaring problem, the pieces are typically required to be well-behaved. For instance, they may be restricted to being the closures of disjoint open sets.
The Erdős–Nagy theorem is a result in discrete geometry stating that a non-convex simple polygon can be made into a convex polygon by a finite sequence of flips. The flips are defined by taking a convex hull of a polygon and reflecting a pocket with respect to the boundary edge. The theorem is named after mathematicians Paul Erdős and Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy.
The Alexandrov uniqueness theorem is a rigidity theorem in mathematics, describing three-dimensional convex polyhedra in terms of the distances between points on their surfaces. It implies that convex polyhedra with distinct shapes from each other also have distinct metric spaces of surface distances, and it characterizes the metric spaces that come from the surface distances on polyhedra. It is named after Soviet mathematician Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov, who published it in the 1940s.
In geometry, a square trisection is a type of dissection problem which consists of cutting a square into pieces that can be rearranged to form three identical squares.
In geometry, an equidissection is a partition of a polygon into triangles of equal area. The study of equidissections began in the late 1960s with Monsky's theorem, which states that a square cannot be equidissected into an odd number of triangles. In fact, most polygons cannot be equidissected at all.
In geometry, a covering of a polygon is a set of primitive units whose union equals the polygon. A polygon covering problem is a problem of finding a covering with a smallest number of units for a given polygon. This is an important class of problems in computational geometry. There are many different polygon covering problems, depending on the type of polygon being covered. An example polygon covering problem is: given a rectilinear polygon, find a smallest set of squares whose union equals the polygon.
In geometry, a partition of a polygon is a set of primitive units, which do not overlap and whose union equals the polygon. A polygon partition problem is a problem of finding a partition which is minimal in some sense, for example a partition with a smallest number of units or with units of smallest total side-length.
In geometry, a zonogon is a centrally-symmetric, convex polygon. Equivalently, it is a convex polygon whose sides can be grouped into parallel pairs with equal lengths and opposite orientations.
Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra is a monograph on the mathematics and computational geometry of mechanical linkages, paper folding, and polyhedral nets, by Erik Demaine and Joseph O'Rourke. It was published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press (ISBN 978-0-521-85757-4). A Japanese-language translation by Ryuhei Uehara was published in 2009 by the Modern Science Company (ISBN 978-4-7649-0377-7).
In the geometry of convex polyhedra, blooming or continuous blooming is a continuous three-dimensional motion of the surface of the polyhedron, cut to form a polyhedral net, from the polyhedron into a flat and non-self-overlapping placement of the net in a plane. As in rigid origami, the polygons of the net must remain individually flat throughout the motion, and are not allowed to intersect or cross through each other. A blooming, reversed to go from the flat net to a polyhedron, can be thought of intuitively as a way to fold the polyhedron from a paper net without bending the paper except at its designated creases.
In computational geometry, the source unfolding of a convex polyhedron is a net obtained by cutting the polyhedron along the cut locus of a point on the surface of the polyhedron. The cut locus of a point consists of all points on the surface that have two or more shortest geodesics to . For every convex polyhedron, and every choice of the point on its surface, cutting the polyhedron on the cut locus will produce a result that can be unfolded into a flat plane, producing the source unfolding. The resulting net may, however, cut across some of the faces of the polyhedron rather than only cutting along its edges.
