Details

Before World War II, the famous logician Alfred Tarski worked as a high school teacher and as assistant to Jan Łukasiewicz. His contributions to elementary mathematics are described in [1].

Polygons that have the same area are called equivalent. In the article "On the Degree of Equivalence of Polygons," Tarski defines the degree of equivalence of two equivalent polygons and as the smallest natural number for which there exists an -piece dissection of to . The function is denoted as .

If is a square of side and is a rectangle of sides and , Tarski introduces and states a theorem about the function .

Tarski did not prove the theorem, but he gave some hints with reference to Wojtowich's book for high schools. The theorem of this Demonstration has been proved using Mathematica graphics [1, pp. 128, 129].

Reference

[1] A. McFarland, J. McFarland and J. T. Smith, eds., Alfred Tarski: Early Work in Poland: Geometry and Teaching, New York: Birkhäuser, 2014.