After More Than Three Centuries, A Geometry Problem That Originated With A Royal Bet Is Solved

After More Than Three Centuries, A Geometry Problem That Originated With A Royal Bet Is Solved

After More Than Three Centuries, A Geometry Problem That Originated With A Royal Bet Is Solved Prince Rupert (left) and Jakob Steininger (right) credit, released as a courtesy of Mr. Steininger A pair of European mathematicians have proven a 300-year-old inference on shapes wrong, and won a bet on behalf of a long-dead Englishmen who got into a famous argument with his prince. The story begins with an experiment: take two gaming dice, put one on top of the other, now think if you could position one in such a way that the other could pass through it without touching the sides. If your suggestion is that no such thing could be possible, than you took the losing side of a bet made 300 years ago between Prince Rupert of the Rhine—a nephew of Charles I of England, and the mathematician John Wallis. Rupert, who had studied glassmaking and metallurgy, proved to Wallis that if you tilted a cube on its side and bored a hole towards its inner diagonal, you could slide the second cube through even if…