Erik D. Demaine Martin L.

Demaine

MIT Laboratory for Computer S ien e

200 Te hnology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
fedemaine, mdemainegmit.edu

Abstra t
We present one hinged disse tion of a square that an be folded into every letter of

a polyabolo alphabet.

Hinged disse tions. Hinged disse tion is a parti ular form of disse tion in whi h one
shape is sli ed into pie es and hinged at their verti es so that the me hanism an be folded
into another shape or shapes. The lassi example is the hinged disse tion of an equilateral
triangle to a square des ribed by Dudeney and shown in Figure 1; see [1℄ for the history
of this disse tion, as well as some other hinged disse tions. Re ently, Frederi kson [2℄ has
written a book devoted entirely to hinged disse tions and te hniques for designing them.

Figure 1: Hinged disse tion of an equilateral triangle into a square [1℄.

Theory. An intriguing open problem is whether every pair of polygons has a hinged disse -
tion. Re ently, there have been two interesting results addressing this problem. Eppstein [3℄
showed how to hinge-disse t any polygon into its mirror image. Eppstein, Frederi kson,
Friedman, and the present authors [4℄ demonstrated a wide family of hinged disse tions for
polyforms, that is, shapes made up of repeated opies of a ommon polygon glued together
edge-to-edge. Examples of polyforms in lude polyominoes, polyiamonds, polyhexes, and
polyaboloes. The hinged disse tions of [4℄ are y les ( losed hains) of pie es, whi h is even
more restri tive than the standard open hains of pie es as in Figure 1.

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Polyaboloes. Here we fo us on polyforms alled polyaboloes, whi h are made up of on-
gruent right isos eles triangles (half-squares). In this ontext, the basi idea of the hinged
disse tions in [4℄ is to split ea h right isos eles triangle into four subtriangles and hinge them
together as shown in Figure 2(a). Then these four-pie e hinged disse tions of right isos eles
triangles an be ombined together edge-to-edge by breaking them at the midpoint of the
ommon edge; see Figure 2(b) for the ase of two triangles. In general, for an n-abolo, the
hinged disse tion has 4n pie es.

(a) Monabolo. (b) Diabolos.

Figure 2: Hinged disse tions from [4℄ for small polyaboloes.

Alphabet. We have designed an alphabet in whi h every letter and digit is a 32-abolo, as
shown in Figure 3. A 4  4 square is also a 32-abolo. Thus, from the results of [4℄, we obtain
a single hinged disse tion with 128 pie es that folds into all letters and digits and the 4  4
square. Two example foldings of this hinged disse tion, one for the letter A and the other
for the square, are shown in Figure 4.

Related work. Harry Lindgren [5℄ designed disse tions of individual re tilinear letters to
a square, spe i ally E, F, H, I, L, M, N, T, V, W, X, Y, and Z. To make the disse tions
similar, he de ided that ea h letter would have a height ve times the thi kness of the strokes.
Our work in some sense strengthens these results, both to hinged disse tions and to all letters
and digits.

Alphabet design. The letters and digits all have height 7 and area 16. The main motiva-
tion for these parameters is to make the area a square number, so that the hinged disse tion
ould fold into an integral square. An area of 9 is too small for a good-looking alphabet
( onsider e.g. the digit 8 or letter B).

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 Figure 3: The 32-abolo alphabet.

Figure 4: Foldings of the 128-pie e hinged disse tion into the letter A and a square.

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Referen es
[1℄ Greg N. Frederi kson. Disse tions: Plane and Fan y. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
[2℄ Greg N. Frederi kson. Hinged Disse tions: Swinging & Twisting. To be published by
Cambridge University Press, May 2002.
[3℄ David Eppstein. Hinged kite mirror disse tion. arXiv paper s.CG/0106032, June 2001.
http://arXiv.org/abs/ s.CG/0106032.

[4℄ Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, David Eppstein, Greg N. Frederi kson, and Eri h
Friedman. Hinged disse tion of polyominoes and polyforms. arXiv paper s.CG/9907018,
November 1999. http://arXiv.org/abs/ s.CG/9907018. A preliminary version appears
in Pro eedings of the 11th Canadian Conferen e on Computational Geometry, 1999.
[5℄ Harry Lindgren. Re tilinear letters. In Re reational Problems in Geometri Disse tions
and How to Solve Them, hapter 18, pages 76{83. Dover Publi ations, In ., 1972. Revised
and enlarged by Greg Frederi kson.