Off the top off my head. As long as the small square isn't of zero area the larger square isn't a square. When the smaller square reaches area zero there is only one square.
What do you think? --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 5:59 PM cody dooderson <d00d3r...@gmail.com> wrote: > A kid momentarily convinced me of something that must be wrong today. > We were working on a math problem called Squareland ( > https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1q3qr65tzau8lLGWKxWssXimrSdqwCQnovt0vgHhw7ro/edit#slide=id.p). > It basically involved dividing big squares into smaller squares. > I volunteered to tell the kids the rules of the problem. I made a fairly > strong argument for why a square can not be divided into 2 smaller squares, > when a kid stumped me with a calculus argument. She drew a tiny square in > the corner of a bigger one and said that "as the tiny square area > approaches zero, the big outer square would become increasingly square-like > and the smaller one would still be a square". > I had to admit that I did not know, and that the argument might hold water > with more knowledgeable mathematicians. > > The calculus trick of taking the limit of something as it gets > infinitely small always seemed like magic to me. > > > Cody Smith > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >
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