A Brief History of Puzzles
While most fields of mathematics have created puzzles for both academic study and recreational use, recreational puzzles have also led to important developments in mathematics. The fields of topology and graph theory have their origins in the analysis of a popular puzzle by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. The puzzle is to find a path over the seven bridges of Königsberg, Germany, without traveling over the same bridge twice. Similar to mathematical puzzles are logic puzzles—puzzles that require deductive reasoning with little or no numerical calculation.
Some of the first number puzzles were included in an important ancient Egyptian mathematical document composed about 1650 BC and known as the Rhind Papyrus. Magic squares, another early form of number puzzle, originated in China before the end of the 1st century. A magic square puzzle forms a square array of numbers so that the rows, columns, and major diagonals all have equal sums.
In 1924 Henry Dudeney published a popular number puzzle of the type known as a cryptarithm, in which letters are replaced with numbers. Dudeney’s puzzle reads: SEND + MORE = MONEY. Cryptarithms are solved by deducing numerical values from the mathematical relationships indicated by the letter arrangements. The only solution to Dudeney’s problem: 9567 + 1085 = 10,652.
On the other hand, Geometric puzzles were studied by Greek mathematician Archimedes in the 3rd century BC, although it is not known whether he also designed the puzzles. The Loculus of Archimedes is a dissection puzzle in which a square is cut into 14 pieces that are to be reassembled (a type of put-together puzzle) to form silhouettes of people, animals, or objects. In 1902 Dudeney published another type of geometric puzzle: Cut an equilateral (equal-sided) triangle into four pieces that can be reassembled into a square.
Logic puzzles and paradoxes were part of the study of logic in the 4th century BC by Greek philosophers, including Aristotle. Zeno of Elea wrote famous paradoxes that attempted to prove that apparently obvious sensory experiences, such as the perception of motion, are in fact impossible. In the 19th century Lewis Carroll popularized several logic puzzles in storybooks such as A Tangled Tale (1880).
One of the first computer puzzles originated in the mid-1970s as the computer program Adventure, an interactive series of written puzzles created by American computer programmers Willie Crowther and Don Woods and distributed on the computer network ARPANET, the predecessor to today’s Internet. The program’s success led to a computer series titled Zork, a text-only story with puzzles that sold more than 1 million copies.
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Tags: education, mathematical games, puzzles
Very interesting post love it!
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