Marjorie Rice
Marjorie Rice (née Jeuck, February 16, 1923 – July 2, 2017)[1] was an American amateur mathematician most famous for her discoveries in geometry.[2] Rice was born in St. Petersburg, Florida, and died in California, where she lived with her son and daughter-in-law.
Contents
Geometry[edit]
In December 1975, Rice came across a Scientific American article on tessellations. Despite having only a high-school education, she began devoting her free time to discovering new pentagonal tilings, ways to tile the plane using pentagons. She developed her own system of notation to represent the constraints on and relationships between the sides and angles of the polygons and used it to discover four new types of tessellating pentagons and over sixty distinct tessellations by pentagons by 1977.[2] Doris Schattschneider helped Martin Gardner validate and popularize the pentagon tiling discoveries of Rice.[3] Schattschneider lauded Rice's work as an exciting discovery by an amateur mathematician.[4]
| Type 9 | Type 11 | Type 12 | Type 13 |
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 b = c = d = e 2A + C = D + 2E = 360° |
 2a + c = d = e A = 90°, 2B + C = 360° C + E = 180° |
 2a = d = c + e A = 90°, 2B + C = 360° C + E = 180° |
 d = 2a = 2e B = E = 90°, 2A + D = 360° |
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Wolchover, Natalie (July 11, 2017), "Marjorie Rice's Secret Pentagons", Quanta Magazine
- ^ a b Perplexing Pentagons Archived 2016-08-13 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Cole, K. C. (March 11, 1998), "Beating the Pros to the Punch", Los Angeles Times.
- ^ Doris Schattschneider. "In praise of amateurs." In David A. Klarner, editor, The Mathematical Gardner, pages 140–166. Prindle, Weber & Schmidt, Boston, 1981
External links[edit]
- Marjorie Rice's home page Archived 2007-08-20 at the Wayback Machine
- Pentagon Tilings demonstration
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- 1923 births
- 2017 deaths
- 20th-century American mathematicians
- 21st-century American mathematicians
- Amateur mathematicians
- Geometers
- American women mathematicians
- People from St. Petersburg, Florida
- Mathematicians from Florida
- 20th-century women mathematicians
- 21st-century women mathematicians
- American mathematician stubs
