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An Anonymous Coward writes:
Mathematician John Baez presents a delightful and beautifully illustrated version of the ultimate question... http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/42.html for which the answer is 42.
Hint -- it's 2D geometry. And maybe the mice should have been bargaining with Zaphod for his brain instead of for Arthur Dent's brain.
Lots more math & physics fun on his pages, I also enjoyed http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rolling/
Added Wikipedia link to the text '42' to explain, for the uninitiated, the HHGttG reference. --Bytram
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14 2017, @03:23AM
The article says "If you try to get several regular polygons to meet snugly at a point in the plane, what's the most sides any of the polygons can have? The answer is 42."
It goes on to discuss cases of 3 regular polygons with different numbers of sides. The way they originally stated the question, 4 squares would be a valid (but not maximal) solution.
My solution to this question, as originally stated: 2 squares, and any other regular polygon (pick the side count as high as you like). Just have the point there they meed be in the middle of one of the edges on the N-gon: at that point all 3 polygons meet, the corners of two squares, and the edge of the other polygon.
Bonus solution: the limit as N=> infinity N-gon, with its corner at the corners of two squares.
Math people should be more pedantic about their specs. The content in the article is more interesting than my solutions, but it makes claims that clearly aren't true because it didn't constrain the problem well enough before claiming there solutions were the only ones.