This is a transcription from the blog
Papergreat: The world of books, ephemera and knowledge, one piece of paper at a time,
as of May 25, 2020.
It was written by Chris Otto, a Pennsylvanian and journalist whose interests include books, ephemera, history, folklore, and more.
He could be reached at chrisottopa@gmail.com .
He introduces his comments with:
"To kick off the latest installment of reader comments in grand fashion,
we have this wonderful email from Greg Frederickson,
who refers to the 2012 post receipt from The Colonial Bookstore in York, Pa."
I had written:
"Your [post] caught my eye, because I got a great start on a sub-obsession as a result of that bookstore. My mother Margaret had been searching there for a birthday present for me and found this obscure geometry book written by an Australian patent examiner. It was Geometric Dissections, by Harry Lindgren, published by D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc. in 1964.
It sat more or less unexamined on my bookshelf at home until 1969, after I had graduated from college and had started a job teaching mathematics at a junior high school in Baltimore, Maryland.
"I wasn't the most prepared math teacher that Baltimore had encountered, having had no instruction in education courses, aside from doing practice teaching in the summer school before the school year was to begin in the fall of 1969. But as an inner-city school district Baltimore was desperate for math teachers and was willing to take a chance on me. It was tough sledding that first year, and at times I was almost ready to give up and risk being drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam. But the supervisory personnel there were first-rate and gave me lots of good advice. One specialist from the downtown headquarters kindly observed that that my classroom was a mess, with pencil scrawlings all over the student desks and absolutely nothing on my pristine bulletin boards. Besides attacking the desks with soapy water, I ransacked the few math books that I had brought with me to Baltimore to see if I could find something to put on my bulletin boards. The cover decorations on Lindgren's book were really eye-catching, so I took some colored construction paper and cut out large pieces, which I then stapled onto a bulletin board to illustrate how to cut one geometric figure into pieces that would rearrange to form another figure.
"My supervisor was sufficiently impressed. But more importantly, I ended up being intrigued by a number of geometric dissections in the book. Knowing almost no one in the city and having lots of time to play around with interesting things, I treated myself to a much more careful look at the book. The author had made a big deal about trying to find the fewest possible number of pieces for any given dissection problem. One morning on a weekend, I discovered a way to modify a dissection so that it used one fewer piece. Suddenly I was off and running: I had my first dissection record! Many more have come since then. Always they were unexpected -- coming before work, late at night, during meals, or at other times when something else was planned.
"And after every couple dissections I would hurry off to get them copied and then mail them halfway around the world to Harry Lindgren in Australia. When the original printing of his book sold out, the copyright was taken over by the paperback publisher Dover Publications. Since I was the one who had rendered parts of his book out of date, Harry assigned me the responsibility of revising his book. It was then retitled Recreational Problems in Geometric Dissections & How to Solve Them, and I was officially listed as the reviser.
"After my third year of teaching in Baltimore, I went on to take some courses in Computer Science at the University of Maryland and eventually graduated with a Ph.D. I landed a tenure-track position in the Computer Science Department at Penn State University in 1977 and then became a full professor at Purdue University in 1986. I transitioned to an emeritus professor there a couple of years ago. Besides my many publications in Computer Science, I have published four additional books in geometric dissections, listed on my webpage
Greg N. Frederickson.
"So I enthusiastically acknowledge a big and grateful 'Thank You' to the Colonial Bookstore of York!' "
(I don't believe that the bookstore still exists. It was on the lower level of the Colonial Shopping Center on South George Street diagonally across from the York Hospital. The entrance was on a back alley behind the shopping center.)
Last updated October 7, 2020.