I posted this on Stack Exchange and got a lot of interest, but no answer.


A recent [Missouri State problem](http://people.missouristate.edu/lesreid/POW12_0910.html) stated that it is easy to decompose the plane into half-open intervals and asked us to do so with intervals pointing in every direction. That got me trying to decompose the plane into closed or open intervals. The best I could do was to make a square with two sides missing (which you can do out of either type) and form a checkerboard with the white squares missing the top and bottom and the black squares missing the left and right. That gets the whole plane except the lattice points. This seems like it must be a standard problem, but I couldn't find it on the web. **Question:** So can the plane be decomposed into unit open intervals? closed intervals?



Decomposing the plane into intervals
Conway and Croft show it can be done for closed intervals and cannot
be done for open intervals in the paper:


[Covering a sphere with congruent great-circle arcs.
Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 60, 1964, pp787–800](https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305004100038263).


