Lineland is a strange country. As the name suggests, it抯 shape (as seen from above) is just a straight line, rather than some two-dimensional shape. The landscape along this line is very mountainous, something which occasionally leads to some problems. One such problem now occurs: in this modern era the king wants to build an airport to stimulate the country抯 economy. Unfortunately, it抯 impossible for airplanes to land on steep airstrips, so a horizontal piece of land is needed. To accommodate for the larger airplanes, this strip needs to have length at least L.
Over the years, the inhabitants of Lineland have become very proficient in flattening pieces of land. Given a piece a land, they can remove rock quickly. They don抰 want to add rock for that may lead to an unstable landing strip. To minimize the amount of effort, however, they want to remove the least amount of rock necessary to reach their goal: a flat piece of land of length L. What is this minimum amount? Because of the low-dimensional nature of Lineland, the amount of rock that needs to be removed is measured as the total area of land above the place where the landing strip is placed, rather than the volume (so in the Figure below, the amount of land removed is given by the lightly shaded area).