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Problem 47: Hinged Dissections

Statement
Does every pair of equal-area polygons have a hinged dissection? A dissection of one polygon A to another B is a partition of A into a finite number of pieces that may be reassembled to form B. A hinged dissection is a dissection where the pieces are hinged at vertices and the reassembling is achieved by rotating the pieces about their hinges in the plane of the polygons.
Origin
[DDE+03], [Fre02, p. 3].
Status/Conjectures
Open.
Partial and Related Results
There are two main partial results. First, any two polyominoes of the same area have a hinged dissection [DDE+03]. A polyomino is a polygon formed by joining unit squares at their edges; see [Kla97] and Problem 37. The polyomino result generalizes to hinged dissections of all edge-to-corresponding-edge gluings of congruent copies of any polygon. Second, any asymmetric polygon has a hinged dissection to its mirror image [Epp01]. Both of these results interpret the problem as ignoring possible intersections between the pieces as they hinge, following what Frederickson calls the ``wobbly-hinged'' model. This freedom may not be necessary, although this seems not to be established in the literature.

Many specific examples of hinged dissections can be found in [Fre02].

Appearances
[O'R02b].
Categories
polygons
Entry Revision History
J. O'Rourke, 25 Mar 2003.

Bibliography

DDE+03
Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, David Eppstein, Greg N. Frederickson, and Erich Friedman.
Hinged dissection of polyominoes and polyforms.
Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, 2003.
To appear. arXiv:cs.CG/9907018, http://www.arXiv.org/abs/cs.CG/9907018. Revised version of paper in Proc. 11th Canad. Conf. Comput. Geom. 1999, 15-18.

Epp01
David Eppstein.
Hinged kite mirror dissection.
ACM Computing Research Repository, June 2001.
arXiv:cs.CG/0106032, http://www.arXiv.org/abs/cs.CG/0106032.

Fre02
Greg Frederickson.
Hinged Dissections: Swinging & Twisting.
Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Kla97
David A. Klarner.
Polyominoes.
In Jacob E. Goodman and Joseph O'Rourke, editors, Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry, chapter 12, pages 225-242. CRC Press LLC, Boca Raton, FL, 1997.

O'R02b
Joseph O'Rourke.
Computational geometry column 44.
Internat. J. Comput. Geom. Appl., 13(3):273-275, 2002.
Also in SIGACT News, 34(2):58-60 (2002), Issue 127.


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Next: Problem 48: Bounded-Degree Minimum Up: The Open Problems Project Previous: Problem 46: 3D Minimum-Bend
The Open Problems Project - July 24, 2008