Jean-Lou De Carufel
According to Wikipedia, "in geometry, an equidissection is a polygon that has been cut up into triangles of equal area." In the 60's, Richman, Thomas and Monsky [1,2,4] proved that a square cannot be divided into an odd number of triangles each having the same area. In this talk, I will discuss the story, the statement and the proof of Richman, Thomas and Monsky's theorem. If we have time, I will also present some extensions to their result.
If you cannot attend, you are invited to read Stein and Szabo [3].
[1] P. Monsky. On dividing a square into triangles. Amer. Math. Monthly, 77 (2), 161 - 164, 1970.
[2] F. Richman and J. Thomas. Problem 5471. Amer. Math. Monthly, 74 (3), 329, 1967.
[3] S.K. Stein and S. Szabo. Algebra and Tiling: Homomorphisms in the service of geometry. The Mathematical Association of America, 207 pages, 1996.
[4] J. Thomas. A dissection problem. Math. Mag., 41 (4), 187 - 190, 1968.