Cube
Crystal
Pyramid
The SOMA cube is a puzzle invented by Danish poet and mathematician Piet Hein (also famous for inventing the Hex game, the superellipse figure and for composing very special short poems named "grooks").
It consists of seven pieces that can be assembled to for a 3x3 cube. There are plenty of good resources on the net, for example Thorleif's SOMA page, so I won't get into much details. I've known the SOMA cube since my childhood, as I was an avid reader of Martin Gardner's column on Scientific American (*), but I bought my cube only a few days ago... when quite close to being forty!
As many others, I like this cube a lot and love to play with it. I think it's especially important that you get a cube that feels good to touch and manipulate, because that's a really important part of playing with the SOMA pieces. My cube is made of natural wood, and it feels very nice.
In this page, I will just collect snapshots of some figures I've managed to do, in no particular order, because I like to watch them as opposed to computer-generated graphics, of which you can find plenty elsewhere.
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Cube |
Crystal |
Pyramid |
(*) Actually I read the collected articles in a book I found at my uncle's (the book is Enigmi e giochi matematici, and has since been reprinted many times and from different publishers). By the time I managed to buy a copy of Scientific American (called Le Scienze in Italy) Martin Gardner's column had been dropped.
Copyright (c) 2005 Alessandro Scotti. All rights reserved.
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