The pieces of a Soma cube (with extra coloring)

The same puzzle, assembled into a cube

The Soma cube is a solid dissection puzzle created by Piet Hein during a lecture on quantum mechanics by Werner Heisenberg. Seven pieces made out of unit cubes must be assembled into a 3x3x3 cube. The pieces can also be used to make a variety of other interesting 3D shapes. A disassembled soma cube (with extra coloring). ... A disassembled soma cube (with extra coloring). ... An assembled soma cube (with extra coloring). ... An assembled soma cube (with extra coloring). ... Mathematical games include many topics which are a part of recreational mathematics, but can also cover topics such as the mathematics of games, and playing games with mathematics. ... Piet Hein (December 16, 1905 - April 18, 1996) was a scientist, mathematician, inventor, author, and poet, often writing under the Old Norse pseudonym Kumbel meaning tombstone. His short poems, gruks (or grooks), first started to appear in the daily newspaper Politiken shortly after the Nazi Occupation in April 1940 under... Fig. ... Werner Heisenberg Werner Karl Heisenberg (December 5, 1901 – February 1, 1976) was a celebrated German physicist and Nobel laureate, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. ...

The pieces of the Soma cube consist of all possible non-regular (i.e. excluding rectangles) combinations of four or less unit cubes. Note the lack of a 2x2x1 square and a 4x1x1 line, and addition of a right-angle piece of only 3 blocks. Of course, if the puzzle actually consisted of only, and all, possible 4 block pieces, then it wouldn't be solvable.

The soma cube is often regarded as the 3D equivalent of tangrams. There are interesting parity properties relating to solutions of the Soma puzzle. A typical tangram construction Tangram (Chinese: 七巧板; pinyin: ; literally seven boards of cunning) is a Chinese puzzle. ... Look up Parity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Parity is a concept of equality of status or functional equivalence. ...

It is unclear whether the puzzle is named after the fictitious drug soma in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World. The term Soma was used in Aldous Huxleys novel Brave New World (1932) in which it describes a mass-produced drug. ... Aldous Huxley Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) was a British writer who emigrated to the United States. ... Book cover of Brave New World. ...

Soma has been discussed in detail by Martin Gardner and John Horton Conway, and the book Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays contains a detailed analysis of the soma cube problem. There are 240 distinct solutions of the soma cube puzzle, up to rotations and reflections: these are easily generated by a simple recursive backtracking search computer program similar to that used for the eight queens puzzle. Martin Gardner (born October 21, 1914) is an American recreational mathematician, skeptic, and author of the long-running but now discontinued Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. ... John Horton Conway (born December 26, 1937, Liverpool, England) is a prolific mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. ... Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays (ISBN 1568811306) by Elwyn R. Berlekamp, John H. Conway, and Richard K. Guy is a compendium of information on mathematical games. ... Look up Up to on Wiktionary, the free dictionary In mathematics, the phrase up to xxxx indicates that members of an equivalence class are to be regarded as a single entity for some purpose. ... Backtracking is a strategy for finding solutions to constraint satisfaction problems. ... One of the 12 unique solutions The eight queens puzzle is the problem of putting eight chess queens on an 8×8 chessboard such that none of them is able to capture any other using the standard chess queens moves. ...

The seven soma pieces are all polycubes of order 3 or 4: In recreational mathematics, a polycube is a polyform with a cube as the base form. ...

• The "L" tricube
• T tetracube: a row of three blocks with one added below the center
• L tetracube: a row of three blocks with one added below the left side
• S tetracube: bent triomino with block placed on outside of clockwise side
• Left screw tetracube: unit cube placed on top of anticlockwise side. Chiral in 3D.
• Right screw tetracube: unit cube placed on top of clockwise side. Chiral in 3D.
• Branch tetracube: unit cube placed on bend. Not chiral in 3D.

Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... In geometry, a figure is chiral (and said to have chirality) if it is not identical to its mirror image, or more particularly if it cannot be mapped to its mirror image by rotations and translations alone. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... In geometry, a figure is chiral (and said to have chirality) if it is not identical to its mirror image, or more particularly if it cannot be mapped to its mirror image by rotations and translations alone. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ...

See also

• Triomino
• Tetromino
• Bedlam cube

A tromino is a geometric shape made from three squares joined along complete edges. ... A tetromino, also spelled tetramino or tetrimino, is a geometric shape composed of four squares, connected orthogonally. ...

External links

• http://www.fam-bundgaard.dk/SOMA/SOMA.HTM
• http://www.geocities.com/dnehen/soma/soma.htm
• http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~sillke/POLYCUBE/SOMA/cube-secrets
• Soma Cube -- from MathWorld
• The puzzle can be played online at http://www.puzzles.com/Projects/MillenniumPuzzles/SomaCube.htm