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The largest sofa you can move around a corner

A new proof reveals the answer to the decades-old “moving sofa” problem. It highlights how even the simplest optimization problems can have counterintuitive answers.

In a 119-page paper, Jineon Baek of Yonsei University in Seoul showed that Gerver’s sofa is the largest shape that can successfully pass through the hallway. Shortly after starting graduate school at the University of Michigan in 2016, Baek took a four-year leave of absence to serve in South Korea’s military (a requirement for male citizens). When Baek finished his graduate studies last year, he intended to continue pursuing computational approaches to fully settle the moving sofa problem.

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