Mathematics largely arose from problems involving the division of crops or fields. Geometers quickly turned land division into the earliest dissection problems, more than two thousand years before the Common Era. The subject was therefore highly practical from the outset!
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance saw the emergence of genuine proof techniques based on decomposing and reassembling figures.
Finally, as the press developed from the 19th century onward, puzzles and dissection problems flourished in newspapers, bringing this wonderfully playful "geometry of scissors" to the general public—limited here, by design, to plane figures with straight edges.
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The law of division
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