Dissection: secondary
Dissection session notes (pdf)
Dissection is an ancient science – how a lot of mathematics was done three thousand years ago – and a modern art.
The children use it to investigate irrational numbers, ‘surds’, in particular those relating the side lengths of the two set squares found in an ordinary school geometry set.
The art comes in taking two shapes of the same area and cutting up one into the smallest number of pieces which can be reassembled as the other.
