I feel like the more valuable thing would probably be the generalization of "fit as many of [irregular polygon] into the least number of length inches of materi

I feel like the more valuable thing would probably be the generalization of "fit as many of [irregular polygon] into the least number of length inches of material width X." OTOH, there are a lot of these math toys that start life in the abstract and then end up finding extremely practical applications down the line— pretty sure that was the case for a lot of the dusty corners of linear algebra until 3D graphics was suddenly a thing and it all became super relevant very quickly.