Here’s Looking at Euclid by Alex Bellos

Author:Alex Bellos
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781416596349
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

What Sam Loyd did with Get Off the Earth was to curve the geometrical vanish so it was in a circular form, and in place of lines put Chinese warriors. There are 12 positions in his puzzle, akin to the 10 lines in the example above. The position in the bottom left corner, where there are originally two warriors, is equivalent to the end lines of the vanish. When the arrow is moved from NE to NW, all the positions gain a bit more warrior, apart from the position with two warriors, which shrinks drastically, giving the impression that a whole warrior has been lost. In fact, it has just been redistributed around the others. Sam Loyd claimed that ten million copies of Get Off the Earth were produced. He became rich and famous, reveling in his reputation as the puzzle king of America.

Meanwhile in Great Britain, Henry Ernest Dudeney was acquiring a similar reputation. If Loyd’s capitalist chutzpah and gift for self-publicity reflected the cut-and-thrust of turn-of-the-century New York, Dudeney embodied the more reserved English way of life.

From a family of Sussex sheep farmers, Dudeney started working at 13 as a clerk in the civil service in London. Bored with the job, he began to submit short stories and puzzles to various publications. Eventually he was able to devote himself to journalism full-time. His wife, Alice, wrote best-selling romantic novels about life in rural Sussex—where, thanks to her royalties, the couple could live in luxury. The Dudeneys, dividing their time between the countryside and London, were part of a highbrow literary scene that included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, perhaps the most famous puzzle solver in all literature.

It is thought that Dudeney and Sam Loyd first made contact in 1894, when Loyd posed a chess problem in the firm belief that no one would find his 53-move solution. Dudeney, who was 17 years Loyd’s junior, found a solution in 50 moves. The men subsequently collaborated but fell out when Dudeney discovered Loyd was plagiarizing his work. Dudeney despised Loyd so intensely that he equated him with the devil.

While both Loyd and Dudeney were self-taught, Dudeney had a much finer mathematical mind. Many of his puzzles touched on deep problems—frequently predating academic interest. In 1962, for example, the mathematician Mei-ko Kwan investigated a problem about the route a postman should take in a grid of streets so as to walk on every street and do it in the shortest route possible. Dudeney had framed—and solved—the same problem in a puzzle about a mine inspector walking through underground shafts almost 50 years earlier.

Another particular forte of Dudeney’s was the geometrical dissection, in which a shape is cut up into pieces and reassembled into another shape, like the principle behind the tangram. Dudeney found a way of converting a square into a pentagon in six pieces. His method became a popular classic because for many years it had been thought that the minimum dissection of a square into a pentagon required seven pieces.

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