Step perimeters and infinite coasts

A few weeks ago I came across this picture on twitter:

I looked at it and thought “13cm, that’s a great question to use for perimeter.” I like questions like this, where you can show that if you invest the sides to the opposite sides of little rectangles the perimeter stays the same. I’ve seen them referred to as “step perimeter” and “cross perimeter” problems. Usually it’s the cross version I use, or a rectangle with a smaller rectangle cut from a corner. I liked this question as it had many different cuts and I feel would be great to open up a discussion on class.

I then thought about the problem a lot more, you could make many cuts. You could make them at irregular intervals like this, or you coukd make them at regular ones. You can look at it many ways. I started thinking about using more and more regular intervals and how it would start to look like a straight line. I then started to consider that. Intuitively it feels like as the intervals get infinitesimally small the limit should be the straight line. But that’s not what happens.

Bizarrely after I’d been thinking on this for a long time I was scrolling through twitter and saw this:

Someone else had obviously been having similar thoughts to me.

I started thinking about it again. I changed it slightly in my head, I changed it to a 5cm by 12 cm rectangle. This was so i could visualise the difference better.

Obviously due to Pythagoras’s Theorem the diagonal of a 5×12 rectangle is 13. But the distance we get by travelling in a series of steps that are parallel to the sides is the semi perimeter- in this case 17. That’s 4cm difference.

What’s going on here? It feels counterintuitive and almost paradoxical. What is going on is that no matter how small the steps are, it’s still longer to take them than it is to cover the distance diagonally. And the sum of all these differences will always be 4 for a 5×12 rectangle.

When you draw them so small it looks diagonal, it’s not actually diagonal. Its still steps. But you cant see them due to the width of the line and the inaccuracies in drawing and human vision. If you zoom in then the steps are their.

It made me think about the coastline paradox. Which states that you can never accurately measure a coastline as it is fractal in nature. The smaller the unit of measurement you use the longer the coastline will be. Meaning that the length of the coastline grows to infinity as your unit of measurement shrinks towards zero, giving coastlines infinite length of you use infinitesimal measurements.

This kinda feels the same as the case if the steps that create the illusion of a straight line. In reality you can’t physically measure an infinitesimal length and you will find a length for the coastline. And in reality you won’t be able to draw the steps that are that small. But it’s a nice interesting result. One I’ve enjoyed thinking about so far, and one I expect I’ll be thinking about some more