Ian has written a fairly shiny search program which confirms your guess that the best dissection is not always equal-sized. 7 into 4 has minimum fragment 5/3, which is not an integer fraction of either stick length. So much for my conjecture.
(I leave the exact dissection of 7 into 4 as an exercise, but it shouldn't be hard given the minimum length :-)
no subject
(I leave the exact dissection of 7 into 4 as an exercise, but it shouldn't be hard given the minimum length :-)