John Carlos Baez on Nostr: Here is Gerver's sofa, the shape with the largest possible area that you can move ...

Here is Gerver's sofa, the shape with the largest possible area that you can move around an L-shaped hallway. The animation was made by Dan Romik, who has a nice web page on this problem, with a link to a Numberphile video about it:

https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~romik/movingsofa/

Here is the Wikipedia article about this problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_sofa_problem

Here is Gerver's original paper about it:

• Joseph L. Gerver, On moving a sofa around a corner, Geometriae Dedicata 42 (1992), 267–283,
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02414066

Hammersley's earlier paper on this subject has one of the most obnoxious titles I've ever seen:

• J. M. Hammersley, On the enfeeblement of mathematical skills by 'Modern Mathematics' and by similar soft intellectual trash in schools and universities, Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications 4 (1968), 66–85, https://archive.org/details/hammersley1968

He was one of those people who thinks teaching kids abstract modern mathematics makes them worse at solving useful problems like "what's the biggest sofa you can move around a corner in the hallway".

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