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Dividing squares into triangles

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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Valentin Hübner.

I will talk about Monsky’s theorem, which says that a square cannot be divided into an odd number of triangles of equal area. The proof involves a weird (but fun) application of a non-archimedean distance function on the rational numbers; I’ll spend some portion of the talk explaining what non-archimedean distance functions are and why they are as important (from some points of view) as the usual notion of distance between two numbers.

This talk is part of the The Archimedeans (CU Mathematical Society) series.

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