My first encounter with Paul Erdős was curiously indirect. As a pre-undergraduate at Cambridge (England) in 1934, I learned from one of the Trinity College tutors that a mathematician named Erdős, passing through Cambridge, had mentioned an intriguing conjecture (attributed to Lusin, I believe), implying that a square could not be dissected into a finite number of unequal smaller square pieces. I passed this problem on to three fellow students, and we eventually found methods that produced counterexamples [1]. Of recent years the advent of high-speed computing has given rise to a considerable industry listing large numbers of dissections of squares into unequal squares ([2] and [6] for example), an industry that could continue indefinitely as there are infinitely many different dissections of this kind.
CITATION STYLE
Stone, A. H. (2013). Encounters with paul erdős. In The Mathematics of Paul Erdos I, Second Edition (pp. 93–98). Springer New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7258-2_6
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