[FOM] Tarski & Moese Degree of Equivalence

[James T. Smith]

Around 1930 Alfred Tarski and Henryk Moese published three papers in Polish
journals about the degree of equivalence of two polygons with equal area:
the minimum number of components in their decompositions into pairwise
congruent subpolygons.

The College of the University of Chicago published rough translations by
Izaak Wirszup in 1952.  Tarski's papers and Wirszup's translations of them
were reprinted in Tarski's 1986 Collected Papers.  Around 1970, Tarski gave
some wonderful talks on the subject to rather general audiences.  There, but
not in the papers, he connected the geometry with some metamathematical
results on definability.

Does anyone know
1.	Anything about Moese?
2.	Why were Wirszup's translations published?
3.	Has anyone else published about this subject since then?

(Moese was then a Polish schoolteacher, not E. E. Moise.  Chicago's library
does not know of any Wirszup archive, and I've found nothing in Berkeley's
archive.  I know of only one reference, in Eves' Survey of Geometry.)

Thanks for considering this!

--------------------------------------
James T. Smith
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
San Francisco State University
mailto:smith at sfsu.edu
http://math.sfsu.edu/smith