Triangles \& princesses \& bears, oh my! A journey from a puzzle to the Schrödinger equation (Q6169844)

The journey starts at a puzzle involving three princesses and three hungry bears. Even though this puzzle is easily seen to be unsolvable, it leads to the following problem: Given two triangles \(\Delta\) and \(\Delta'\) with the same area in the Euclidean plane \(\mathbb R^2\), what is the ``shortest path'' from \(\Delta\) to \(\Delta'\) through equal-area triangles. By identifying \(\mathbb R^2\) with \(\mathbb C\), the field of complex numbers, and by considering ordered triangles, this problem is turned into a problem about geodesics on a particular hypersurface in \(\mathbb C^3\cong \mathbb R^6\). Solutions to the latter problem are exhibited in great detail. Next, these findings are generalised to ordered \(n\)-gons and, by a limit process \(n\to \infty\), to ``loops''. In this way, the reader finally is guided to the Schrödinger equation.