Pentominoes drive puzzle fans wild-and a complete set of these versatile tiles is packaged with every copy of this fun-filled book! These 12 unique shapes, each formed by 5 squares joined edge to edge, must be fitted together to match specific patterns-from simple rectangles to animals and people. Eric Harshbarger is a mathematician by education, a computer engineer by trade, and a puzzle wizard by personal choice. His website (www.ericharshbarger.org) features his astounding creations with Lego bricks, among other marvels. Book comes with a full set of plastic pentominoes, making this a great gift
If you take five squares of the same size and join them edge to edge, the resulting shape is called a pentomino. This book shows some of the possibilities, poses some problems and suggests fruitful lines of investigtion.
Chasing Vermeer joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes exclusive bonus content!When a book of unexplainable occurences brings Petra and Calder together, strange things start to happen: Seemingly unrelated events connect; an eccentric old woman seeks their company; an invaluable Vermeer painting disappears. Before they know it, the two find themselves at the center of an international art scandal, where no one is spared from suspicion. As Petra and Calder are drawn clue by clue into a mysterious labyrinth, they must draw on their powers of intuition, their problem solving skills, and their knowledge of Vermeer. Can they decipher a crime that has stumped even the FBI?
The Art of Puzzles is a collection of mental masterpieces from the world's most talented puzzle designers. With ten genres of logic puzzles and over 270 puzzles in total, this book has a great mix of challenges including shading puzzles (Tapa and Nurikabe), loop puzzles (Masyu and Slitherlink), number placement puzzles (Skyscrapers and TomTom), object placement puzzles (Star Battle and Battleships), and region division puzzles (Cave and Fillomino). Each section has a mix of very easy to fiendishly hard puzzles, with hints for every puzzle to help you to become a better logic puzzler.
Inspiring popular video games like Tetris while contributing to the study of combinatorial geometry and tiling theory, polyominoes have continued to spark interest ever since their inventor, Solomon Golomb, introduced them to puzzle enthusiasts several decades ago. In this fully revised and expanded edition of his landmark book, the author takes a new generation of readers on a mathematical journey into the world of the deceptively simple polyomino. Golomb incorporates important, recent developments, and poses problems, inviting the reader to play with and develop an understanding of the extraordinary properties of polyominoes.
Colorful geometrical pentagors, composed of pentagons and triangles and dissected into pieces: Can you put the shapes together again to form a whole? A classic paradox about the nature of motion from a famous Greek mathematician: Can you see what’s wrong with it? Put on your thinking cap and prepare to give your math and logic abilities a workout, because these super-looking puzzles demand real brainpower. Solve a graphic problem that involves the calculation of a square root. Examine six linear processions of egg-carrying ants, and figure out which lines are “surprising” and which ones aren’t. Go step by step through a multihued grid and try to find 32 different configurations within. These puzzles are challenging, entertaining, and satisfying to unravel.
The definitive story of a game so great, even the Cold War couldn't stop it Tetris is perhaps the most instantly recognizable, popular video game ever made. But how did an obscure Soviet programmer, working on frail, antiquated computers, create a product which has now earned nearly 1 billion in sales? How did a makeshift game turn into a worldwide sensation, which has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, inspired a big-budget sci-fi movie, and been played in outer space? A quiet but brilliant young man, Alexey Pajitnov had long nurtured a love for the obscure puzzle game pentominoes, and became obsessed with turning it into a computer game. Little did he know that the project that he labored on alone, hour after hour, would soon become the most addictive game ever made. In this fast-paced business story, reporter Dan Ackerman reveals how Tetris became one of the world's first viral hits, passed from player to player, eventually breaking through the Iron Curtain into the West. British, American, and Japanese moguls waged a bitter fight over the rights, sending their fixers racing around the globe to secure backroom deals, while a secretive Soviet organization named ELORG chased down the game's growing global profits. The Tetris Effect is an homage to both creator and creation, and a must-read for anyone who's ever played the game-which is to say everyone.
Pentominoes are colored geometric shapes that fit together like puzzle pieces. Activities with them encourage development of problem solving and visual perception skills, and recognition of geometric shapes and relationships. Set includes 6 sets of 12 pieces each.
In 17 chapters, this book attempts to deal with well-known and less well-known topics in mathematics. This is done in a vivid way and therefore the book contains a wealth of colour illustrations. It deals with stars and polygons, rectangles and circles, straight and curved lines, natural numbers, square numbers and much more. If you look at the illustrations, you will discover plenty of exciting and beautiful things in mathematics. The book offers a variety of suggestions to think about what is depicted and to experiment in order to make and check your own assumptions. For many topics, no (or only few) prerequisites from school lessons are needed. It is an important concern of the book that young people find their way to mathematics and that readers whose school days are some time ago discover new things. The numerous references to internet sites and further literature help in this respect. "Solutions" to the suggestions interspersed in the individual sections can be downloaded from the Springer website. The book was thus written for everyone who enjoys mathematics or who would like to understand why the book bears this title. It is also aimed at teachers who want to give their students additional or new motivation to learn. This book is a translation of the original German 2nd edition Mathematik ist schön by Heinz Klaus Strick, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). In the subsequent editing, the author, with the friendly support of John O'Connor, St Andrews University, Scotland, tried to make it closer to a conventional translation. Still, the book may read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.
From the New York Times-bestselling team behind Chasing Vermeer comes another thought-provoking art mystery featuring Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie house--now in After Words paperback! Spring semester at the Lab School in Hyde Park finds Petra and Calder drawn into another mystery when unexplainable accidents and ghostly happenings throw a spotlight on Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, and it's up to the two junior sleuths to piece together the clues. Stir in the return of Calder's friend Tommy (which creates a tense triangle), H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man, 3-D pentominoes, and the hunt for a coded message left behind by Wright, and the kids become tangled in a dangerous web in which life and art intermingle with death, deception, and surprise.
