Indeed! He mentions something related at 5:00 in the video (https://youtu.be/BxQw4CdxLr8?t=300 https://youtu.be/BxQw4CdxLr8?t=300): > You know, people think th

Indeed! He mentions something related at 5:00 in the video (https://youtu.be/BxQw4CdxLr8?t=300 https://youtu.be/BxQw4CdxLr8?t=300): > You know, people think that mathematicians have been working for hundreds of years and now there's tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of mathematicians all spending every day working on problems so how could you possibly still find a simple down-to-earth problem that hasn't already been studied, you know, way too much? And the answer is: those problems aren't rare at all, they keep coming up several times a year, and this is an example where even this very basic problem of rectangle into rectangles has all kinds of, sort of, stones not yet turned. And the other thing you mentioned is one of the reasons it's always a pleasure for me to see Knuth's talks or read his work — he is one of the mathematicians (like Euler and unlike Gauss) who make it seem simple: we get the impression that we could do it too, if we spent enough time on it, that things are within reach for us, just barely. This is so inspiring. And then of course when you step back and look at his body of work, it's staggering! (Something like this talk may account for about half a page of Knuth's published output, and he has thousands of them…) That's additionally inspiring.