Covering a square by congruent squares

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to address the following problem: given a positive integer $n$, find the largest value $S(n)$ such that a square of edge length $S(n)$ in the Euclidean plane can be covered by $n$ unit squares. We investigate also the variant in which the goal is to cover only the boundary of a square. We show that these two problems are equivalent for $n \leq 4$, but not for $n=5$. For both problems, we also present the solutions for $n=5$.