SQUARING THE SQUARESquaring the square is the problem of tiling an integral square using only other integral squares. (An integral square is a square whose sides have integer length.) The name was coined in a humorous analogy with squaring the circle. Squaring the square is an easy task unless additional conditions are set. The most studied restriction is that the squaring be perfect, meaning that the sizes of the smaller squares are all different. A related problem is squaring the plane, which can be done even with the restriction that each natural number occurs exactly once as a size of a square in the tiling.
A "perfect" squared square is a square such that each of the smaller squares has a different size. A "simple" squared square is one where no subset of the squares forms a rectangle or square, otherwise it is "compound". The smallest simple perfect squared square was discovered by A. J. W. Duijvestijn using a computer search. His tiling uses 21 squares, and has been proved to be minimal. WIKIPEDIA |

