Soma Cube - Piet Hein by John Devost

I made a couple of copies of this classic design and decided to offer this one up, here’s what I wrote about it on my blog:  (gleaned from google)

‘The Soma cube is a solid dissection puzzle invented by Danish polymath Piet Hein in 1933 during a lecture on quantum mechanics conducted by Werner Heisenberg.

The same puzzle, assembled into a cube.

Seven different pieces made out of unit cubes must be assembled into a 3×3×3 cube. The pieces can also be used to make a variety of other 3Dshapes.

The pieces of the Soma cube consist of all possible combinations of at most four unit cubes, joined at their faces, such that at least one inside corner is formed. There are no combinations of one or two cubes that satisfy this condition, but one combination of three cubes and six combinations of four cubes that do. Thus, 3 + (6 × 4) is 27, which is exactly the number of cells in a 3×3×3 cube. Of these seven combinations, two are mirror images of each other (see Chirality).

The Soma cube was popularized by Martin Gardner in the September 1958 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. The book Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays also contains a detailed analysis of the Soma cube problem.

There are 240 distinct solutions of the Soma cube puzzle, excluding rotations and reflections: these are easily generated by a simple recursive backtracking search computer program similar to that used for the eight queens puzzle. John Horton Conway and Michael Guy first identified all 240 possible solutions by hand in 1961.’

Pieces are Walnut.  Box and Lid is Red Zebrawood with Maple Sleeve and Slipfeathers.

Everything has been ‘Triple Buffed’ to a brilliant sheen.

Shipping cost to be determined at close of auction.