Coffee Hour and the Conway–Soifer Cover-Up

Abstract

During the years 2002–2004 I was visiting Princeton University with its fabulous mathematics department, a great fixture of which was a daily coffee hour in the commons room, attended by everyone, from students to the Beautiful Mind (John F.Nash, Jr.). For one such coffee hour I came thinking again about the drawing depicted in this book in Figure 2.2. This time I imagined that we dealt with equilateral triangles, and the crux of the figure was a demonstration that n ² unit triangles can cover a triangle of side n.