For nearly 60 years, scientists have struggled to solve a problem that seems incredibly simple: moving a sofa through a narrow L-shaped corner.
The problem was posed by Leo Moser, an Austrian mathematician of Canadian descent, in 1966. Moser asked the question: What is the largest sofa shape that can be maneuvered through a right angle in an L-shaped corridor?
Although this may appear straightforward, it is mathematically quite complex, as it involves optimizing both the area and the movement of the object.
The challenging sofa moving problem now has a solution (Photo: Getty).
If one were to use a square sofa, it would be as easy as pie. However, if the sofa is rectangular and composed of two squares, it would clearly get stuck.
Jineon Baek, a postdoctoral researcher in mathematics at Yonsei University (South Korea), is the one who found the answer to this puzzling problem.
In a 100-page report published on November 24, Baek concluded that for a corridor with a hypothetical width of 1 unit, the maximum area of the imaginary sofa that can be moved through the right angle is 2.2195 units.
Prior to Baek, many mathematicians had attempted to solve this problem.
The solution to the sofa problem as discovered by mathematician Joseph Gerver (Photo: Live Science).
The first to tackle the problem was John Hammersley, a British mathematician. He discovered just two years after the problem was posed that a rectangular sofa would not be able to solve the issue.
Instead, the sofa had to be adjusted to take on a crescent shape. This way, the sofa could have a maximum area of up to 2.2074 units, according to Hammersley’s calculations.
Nearly a quarter-century later, Joseph Gerver, a mathematician from Rutgers University (USA), demonstrated that the sofa could achieve an area range from 2.2195 to 2.37 units.
Among these, 2.37 is considered by Gerver to be the upper limit that the sofa can achieve. The sofa in Gerver’s research is a U-shaped couch made up of 18 distinct curves, allowing it to maneuver around the corner without getting stuck.
Nevertheless, Jineon Baek employed algorithms with the assistance of computers to dismiss the upper limit proposed by Gerver. He asserted that the largest sofa has an area of 2.2195 units to move through a 1-unit wide L corner.
