Tarski's circle-squaring problem

Tarski's circle-squaring problem is the challenge, posed by Alfred Tarski in 1925,[1] to take a disc in the plane, cut it into finitely many pieces, and reassemble the pieces so as to get a square of equal area. It is possible, using pieces that are Borel sets, but not with pieces cut by Jordan curves.

Solutions

Tarski's circle-squaring problem was proven to be solvable by Miklós Laczkovich in 1990. The decomposition makes heavy use of the axiom of choice and is therefore non-constructive. Laczkovich estimated the number of pieces in his decomposition at roughly 1050. The pieces used in his decomposition are non-measurable subsets of the plane.[2][3]

Laczkovich actually proved the reassembly can be done using translations only; rotations are not required. Along the way, he also proved that any simple polygon in the plane can be decomposed into finitely many pieces and reassembled using translations only to form a square of equal area.[2][3]

It follows from a result of Wilson (2005) that it is possible to choose the pieces in such a way that they can be moved continuously while remaining disjoint to yield the square. Moreover, this stronger statement can be proved as well to be accomplished by means of translations only.[4]

A constructive solution was given by Łukasz Grabowski, András Máthé and Oleg Pikhurko in 2016 which worked everywhere except for a set of measure zero.[5] More recently, Andrew Marks and Spencer Unger gave a completely constructive solution using about Borel pieces.[6]

Limitations

Lester Dubins, Morris W. Hirsch & Jack Karush proved it is impossible to dissect a circle and make a square using pieces that could be cut with an idealized pair of scissors (that is, having Jordan curve boundary).[7]

The Bolyai–Gerwien theorem is a related but much simpler result: it states that one can accomplish such a decomposition of a simple polygon with finitely many polygonal pieces if both translations and rotations are allowed for the reassembly.[2][3]

These results should be compared with the much more paradoxical decompositions in three dimensions provided by the Banach–Tarski paradox; those decompositions can even change the volume of a set. However, in the plane, a decomposition into finitely many pieces must preserve the sum of the Banach measures of the pieces, and therefore cannot change the total area of a set.[8]

See also

References

  1. ^ Tarski, Alfred (1925), "Probléme 38", Fundamenta Mathematicae, 7: 381
  2. ^ a b c Laczkovich, Miklos (1990), "Equidecomposability and discrepancy: a solution to Tarski's circle squaring problem", Journal für die Reine und Angewandte Mathematik, 1990 (404): 77–117, doi:10.1515/crll.1990.404.77, MR 1037431, S2CID 117762563
  3. ^ a b c Laczkovich, Miklos (1994), "Paradoxical decompositions: a survey of recent results", Proc. First European Congress of Mathematics, Vol. II (Paris, 1992), Progress in Mathematics, vol. 120, Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 159–184, MR 1341843
  4. ^ Wilson, Trevor M. (2005), "A continuous movement version of the Banach–Tarski paradox: A solution to De Groot's problem" (PDF), Journal of Symbolic Logic, 70 (3): 946–952, doi:10.2178/jsl/1122038921, MR 2155273, S2CID 15825008
  5. ^ Grabowski, Łukasz; Máthé, András; Pikhurko, Oleg (April 27, 2022), "Measurable equidecompositions for group actions with an expansion property", Journal of the European Mathematical Society, 24 (12): 4277–4326, arXiv:1601.02958, doi:10.4171/JEMS/1189
  6. ^ Marks, Andrew; Unger, Spencer (2017), "Borel circle squaring", Annals of Mathematics, 186 (2): 581–605, arXiv:1612.05833, doi:10.4007/annals.2017.186.2.4, S2CID 738154
  7. ^ Dubins, Lester; Hirsch, Morris W.; Karush, Jack (December 1963), "Scissor congruence", Israel Journal of Mathematics, 1 (4): 239–247, doi:10.1007/BF02759727, ISSN 1565-8511
  8. ^ Wagon, Stan (1993), The Banach–Tarski Paradox, Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications, vol. 24, Cambridge University Press, p. 169, ISBN 9780521457040