Today for National Puzzle Day we challenge you to solve the Stomachion. Created by Archimedes over 2,200 years ago, Archimedes’s Stomachion is a mathematical puzzle that is believed to be the world’s oldest known mathematical puzzle. The puzzle is also known as the Loculus of Archimedes or the Ostomachion. It consists of 14 pieces that can be arranged in many different ways to form a square.

The Stomachion was described in a manuscript attributed to Archimedes, a Greek mathematician who lived in the third century BC. The manuscript is known as the Archimedes Palimpsest, which is a copy of a text written by Archimedes that was made in Byzantine times. The puzzle is also mentioned in the works of other ancient authors, including Ausonius, Victorinus, Bassus, Ennodius, and Lucretius.

The Stomachion is similar to tangrams, which are a type of puzzle that originated in China. The puzzle is played by rearranging the pieces to create different objects, animals, plants, and other shapes. Some of the shapes that can be created with the Stomachion include an elephant, a tree, a barking dog, a ship, a sword, and a tower.

The Stomachion is not only a fun puzzle to play, but it also has mathematical significance. The puzzle has been used to study combinatorics, which is a branch of mathematics that deals with the study of discrete objects. The number of different ways that the pieces of the Stomachion can be arranged within a square was determined to be 17,152 by Fan Chung, Persi Diaconis, Susan P. Holmes, and Ronald Graham, and confirmed by a computer search by William H. Cutler. However, this count has been disputed because surviving images of the puzzle show it in a rectangle, not a square, and rotations or reflections of pieces may not have been allowed.

The Stomachion has also been used to study the history of mathematics. The puzzle is one of the earliest known examples of a mathematical puzzle, and it has been used to study the development of mathematical puzzles throughout history . The Stomachion is also an example of the type of mathematical problems that were studied by ancient Greek mathematicians, including Archimedes.

To solve the Stomachion, all you have to do is make a square out of 14 pieces. With 536 ways of achieving this, you would think it is easy, but even finding 1 solution (apart from the starting one!) is something you can be really proud of. If you want to buy one online, you can find it in many places, including Amazon.