Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 “Dat Pussle”
- 2 Our Geometric Universe
- 3 Fearful Symmetry
- 4 It's Hip to Be a Square
- 5 Triangles and Friends
- 6 All Polygons Created Equal
- 7 First Steps
- 8 Step Right Up!
- 9 Watch Your Step!
- 10 Just Tessellating
- 11 Plain Out-Stripped
- 12 Strips Teased
- 13 Tessellations Completed
- 14 Maltese Crosses
- 15 Curves Ahead
- 16 Stardom
- 17 Farewell, My Lindgren
- 18 The New Breed
- 19 When Polygons Aren't Regular
- 20 On to Solids
- 21 Cubes Rationalized
- 22 Prisms Reformed
- 23 Cheated, Bamboozled, and Hornswoggled
- 24 Solutions to All Our Problems
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index of Dissections
- General Index
10 - Just Tessellating
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 “Dat Pussle”
- 2 Our Geometric Universe
- 3 Fearful Symmetry
- 4 It's Hip to Be a Square
- 5 Triangles and Friends
- 6 All Polygons Created Equal
- 7 First Steps
- 8 Step Right Up!
- 9 Watch Your Step!
- 10 Just Tessellating
- 11 Plain Out-Stripped
- 12 Strips Teased
- 13 Tessellations Completed
- 14 Maltese Crosses
- 15 Curves Ahead
- 16 Stardom
- 17 Farewell, My Lindgren
- 18 The New Breed
- 19 When Polygons Aren't Regular
- 20 On to Solids
- 21 Cubes Rationalized
- 22 Prisms Reformed
- 23 Cheated, Bamboozled, and Hornswoggled
- 24 Solutions to All Our Problems
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index of Dissections
- General Index
Summary
At long last the train pulled out of Charing Cross station and away from the fogbound throng of idolizers and skeptics. The couple on board would share just a few more days together before their two lives, so distinctively patterned and strikingly overlaid, were forever cut asunder. Eli Lemon Sheldon, an American mortgage banker posted in London, who under the pseudonym “Don Lemon” had engaged literally Everybody in the 1890s with his six-penny anthologies, would be dead within a year. His wife, Mary French-Sheldon, resident of New York and daughter of a spiritualist and faith healer, would soon, under the appellation “Bébé Bwana” (or “Woman Master”), lead an expedition through East Africa and then return to write a popular book and produce her own World's Fair exhibit based on her adventures. Had this superposition of unusual lives catalyzed in some inexplicable manner the one remarkable dissection found in one of Lemon's books?
The dissection referred to here is that of a Greek Cross to a square in four pieces, which is found in (Lemon 1890) and reproduced in Figure 10.2. And although Eli Lemon Sheldon lived an unusual life, it appears that this dissection should not be attributed to him. Jerry Slocum (1996) reproduces a 2½ inch × 4½ inch advertising card for Scourene, a scouring soap manufactured by the Simonds Soap Company of New York City.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- DissectionsPlane and Fancy, pp. 105 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997