Some math teachers were sharing dinner following last week’s Northwest Math Conference when Marc Garneau said something truly implausible:

If you have a class of students draw a rectangle, they’ll combine to create the golden rectangle.

Truly implausible, but Marc stood by it, along with at least one other member of our party. Dave Major set up a web page so we could collect data. You all obliged us with 1,400 rectangles, about a third of which I’ll show you in this video:

Mean: 6.16; Median: 2.087; Standard Deviation: 18.296. So, no, not the golden rectangle. And now Marc owes me a new car.

a different dave wrote:

I predict that the shape of the rectangles is going to be very heavily influenced by the shape of the canvas provided.

Not that either. Now a different dave owes me a new car too.

Here’s all the data. Tell us something interesting about them we don’t already know.