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Origami Soma Cube Blocks

By John Farrier in Arts & Crafts on Nov 25, 2009 at 3:37 pm



Photo: Qiao Chang

Qiao Chang of SmugMug is a commercial photographer who creates origami figures as a hobby. One of her works takes the form of a mathematical puzzle called a Soma cube:

A solid dissection puzzle invented by Piet Hein during a lecture on Quantum Mechanics by Werner Heisenberg. There are seven soma pieces composed of all the irregular face-joined cubes (polycubes) with <=4 cubes. The object is to assemble the pieces into a cube. There are 240 essentially distinct ways of doing so (Beeler 1972, Berlekamp et al. 1982), as first enumerated one rainy afternoon in 1961 by J. H. Conway and Mike Guy.

Link via GearFuse | Soma Cube Explanation


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COMMENT
  1. pwscott
    Nov 25th, 2009 at 4:54 pm

    Try to wrap your head around that one. :p

  2. Cheezwhiz
    Nov 25th, 2009 at 6:10 pm

    And yet, all I can think of is Tetris.

  3. pyrit
    Nov 25th, 2009 at 7:18 pm

    Aaaaaaaaaah! Tetris! Noooooo!

    Oh. It's Origami. OK then. I'm OK.

    Better them than me...

  4. housetier
    Nov 25th, 2009 at 7:35 pm

    looks like tetris3d to me, only more haptic :)

  5. laly
    Nov 26th, 2009 at 1:08 am

    Next step... An origami Rubik's cube!

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