Jigsaw Puzzler

December 15, 2023 9:14 AM

"We've all been there: it's puzzle time, but once you dump out the pieces and start laying them flat, you realize you don't have enough space on your table. Join me as we use physics to find out HOW BIG A TABLE YOU NEED FOR YOUR JIGSAW PUZZLE?
TL;DR: an unassembled jigsaw puzzle takes up an area that is the square root of 3 times the area of the assembled puzzle, or about 1.7 times the assembled area. This is independent of the number of pieces."
posted by vacapinta (12 comments total)

Now that’s what science is all about!
posted by notoriety public at 9:52 AM on December 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

More academic papers should write their abstracts in the form of a toot/skeet-thread
posted by Plutor at 9:58 AM on December 15, 2023

You WANT more space than that though, so you have clear space to work. Ideally I like to put together the edge pieces and have empty space in the middle, with not yet used pieces outside that frame. (My current table is too small for that, alas.)
posted by metasarah at 10:07 AM on December 15, 2023

It's also nice to be able to reclaim the table without interrupting the puzzling
posted by cubby at 10:33 AM on December 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

My family go massive on a Christmas Jigsaw and we live in a small house; so I've cut a plywood board which allows a generous margin round a finished 2000 piece jigsaw and can be slid under the sofa. Generous margin is only √(1.7) = 30% bigger than the edges. Low tech; altho !respeck! to Simone Giertz.

This blurf in area also applies to scones after being cut from a round of rolled dough.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:03 AM on December 15, 2023

This equation clearly doesn't hold true for a one-piece jigsaw puzzle
posted by oulipian at 11:37 AM on December 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

This equation clearly doesn't hold true for a one-piece jigsaw puzzle

False: a one piece jigsaw puzzle is already complete, and the theory only holds for sets of incompleted pieces.

Thus, pedantically (and this is certainly the thread for that), what you should have said is “This equation clearly doesn’t apply to a one-piece jigsaw puzzle.”
posted by notoriety public at 11:53 AM on December 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I know I'm supposed to engage with the math problem at hand, but I feel compelled to point out that some of those surface protection mats for the floor can also be very useful for jigsaw-sizing a table surface too small for the task. (Maybe don't let it project over the table surface on the side where you plan to lean on it)
posted by Ashenmote at 12:06 PM on December 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

chez in-laws we get out all the half sheet trays (well, get them out of the drying rack because puzzles are post-feast) so we can sort the pieces and stack up the sorts then pass them around

this is still good stuff tho thanks
posted by clew at 1:50 PM on December 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

√3 also shows up in a recent result about the minimal length for a Möbius strip of a given width:

Once Schwartz redid the calculation with the trapezoid fix, √3 popped out. He’d finally proved, that the length of a Möbius strip must be greater than √3 times its width, Schwartz reported August 24 at arXiv.org. The triangular Möbius strip is truly the limit for paper Möbius strips.

posted by jamjam at 2:27 PM on December 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

As someone who works in academia I'm mostly just impressed they managed to pull off the Jiu-Jitsu move "transform quarantine jigsaw puzzles into a publishing credit." Many tried to turn whatever they did to stave off pandemic despair into research, few succeeded.
posted by range at 3:39 PM on December 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

Impressed by the science, but I would like to point out that the obvious space-saving solution is to leave all the pieces in the box and pick them out one by one, which is what I do. I find it incredibly more fun and satisfying than sorting!
posted by lydhre at 1:48 PM on December 17, 2023