Equidissection

In geometry, an equidissection is a partition of a polygon into triangles of equal area. The study of equidissections began in the late 1960s with Monsky's theorem, which states that a square cannot be equidissected into an odd number of triangles.^[1] In fact, most polygons cannot be equidissected at all.^[2]

Much of the literature is aimed at generalizing Monsky's theorem to broader classes of polygons. The general question is: Which polygons can be equidissected into how many pieces? Particular attention has been given to trapezoids, kites, regular polygons, centrally symmetric polygons, polyominos, and hypercubes.^[3]

Equidissections do not have many direct applications.^[4] They are considered interesting because the results are counterintuitive at first, and for a geometry problem with such a simple definition, the theory requires some surprisingly sophisticated algebraic tools. Many of the results rely upon extending p-adic valuations to the real numbers and extending Sperner's lemma to more general colored graphs.^[5]