A regular pentagon may be cut into as few as six pieces that will fit
together without any turning over and form a square, as I shall show
below. Hitherto the best answer has been in seven pieces--the solution
produced some years ago by a foreign mathematician, Paul Busschop. We
first form a parallelogram, and from that the square. The process will
be seen in the diagram on the next page.
The pentagon is ABCDE. By the cut AC and the cut FM (F being the middle
point between A and C, and M being the same distance from A as F) we get
two pieces that may be placed in position at GHEA and form the
parallelogram GHDC. We then find the mean proportional between the
length HD and the _height_ of the parallelogram. This distance we mark
off from C at K, then draw CK, and from G drop the line GL,
perpendicular to KC. The rest is easy and rather obvious. It will be
seen that the six pieces will form either the pentagon or the square.
I have received what purported to be a solution in five pieces, but the
method was based on the rather subtle fallacy that half the diagonal
plus half the side of a pentagon equals the side of a square of the same
area. I say subtle, because it is an extremely close approximation that
will deceive the eye, and is quite difficult to prove inexact. I am not
aware that attention has before been drawn to this curious
approximation.
[Illustration]
Another correspondent made the side of his square 1¼ of the side of
the pentagon. As a matter of fact, the ratio is irrational. I calculate
that if the side of the pentagon is 1--inch, foot, or anything else--the
side of the square of equal area is 1.3117 nearly, or say roughly
1+3/10. So we can only hope to solve the puzzle by geometrical methods.