Once upon a time, there were four students at Trinity College in Cambridge (United Kingdom), a school that considers itself “a world-leading academic institution, with a distinguished history and tradition in education, teaching, and research.” Although the story begins a little before they met there: it was in late 1934 or early 1935, when Professor William Dean visited the school of our first protagonist, Arthur Stone, and in his talk stated that the problem of proving that a square could not be dissected into a finite number of distinct squares (known as Lusin's conjecture) was still unsolved. What were then known were so-called perfectly square rectangles or “perfect rectangles,” which are those that can be divided… See more
