Harry Lindgren looked up to survey the evening sky: Those millions of points of light were not the ones of his youth. For he had left a homeland of dimmed prospects to seek opportunity “down under.” Each blinking light, which long ago had seemed so small and twinkly, he now knew to represent an object of magnificent size and remarkable structure. And if he were to have surveyed his own life, he might have found a curious resonance.

Denied the chance for postgraduate study in mathematics, he had focused on mathematical recreations. His work on geometric dissections had supernovaed, and he had come to outshine previous luminaries, Henry Dudeney and Sam Loyd included. And when his book was almost finished, he had made a discovery that would ensure his place among the stars. He had found the key to their structure, and with it an elegant new type of dissection, based on simple trigonometric relationships. For us then, he left another sky – his own – full of those beautiful star dissections.