Stomachion

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Royal
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Stomachion

Post by Royal » Wed Feb 29, 2012 10:26 am

In 2003, math historians discovered long lost information on the Stomachion of Archimedes. In particular, an ancient parchment, overwritten by monks nearly a thousand years ago, describes Archimedes' Stomachion, a puzzle involving combinatorics.

Combonatorics is a field of math dealing with the number of ways a given problem can be solved. The goal of the stomachion is to determine in how many ways the 14 pieces shown here can be put together to make a square. In 2003, four mathematicians determined that the number is 17,152.

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