The two rectangles are congruent. What’s the shaded area?pic.twitter.com/didtAhl6tG
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The moral here is profound, I think: problems are difficult only because we do not yet perceive the broader context to which they naturally belong. Solving a problem is often, and perhaps should always be, mostly just the placement of it in that broader natural context.
A postscript, for those who feel I made the above picture rather more symmetrical than I should have: nothing essential changes in the more general case, as this picture shows.pic.twitter.com/kSrs6BAmmb
