Tetrahedra: From Aristotle’s Mistake to Unsolved Problems
- Speaker
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Bjorn Poonen, Ph.D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Simons Foundation Lectures are free public colloquia related to basic science and mathematics. These high-level talks are intended for professors, students, postdocs and business professionals, but interested people from the metropolitan area are welcome as well.

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Tetrahedra are three-dimensional shapes with four triangular faces. Which tetrahedra can tile to fill a three-dimensional space? Which tetrahedra have rational dihedral angles (the angle between two intersecting planes)? Which tetrahedra can be sliced and reassembled into a cube? Each of these three problems has been around for at least 45 years, and one of them is over 2300 years old. In this lecture, Bjorn Poonen will discuss the status of these problems and explain how he solved one of them in collaboration with K. Kedlaya, A. Kolpakov, and M. Rubinstein.
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