Gathering for Gardner UT created

Today 21st of October is a special date.

I've created a UT dedicated to h4 opening :

Play h4 for Martin Gardner: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7615

G4G

The links again: article at Chessbase: Celebrating Martin Gardner

and the G4G site: G4G Celebration of Mind party,

to celebrate the legacy of Martin Gardner

When I was young I built a Soma cube, some flexagons, and a "computer" (made from Dixie cups and marbles!) that learned to play tic-tac-toe. Later on I had some store-bought pentominos. And somewhere around the house I have the "report" you could send away for on the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman cipher whose mailing was delayed by a rogue NSA employee. All of this was from reading about them in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

Earlier today, to celebrate the Gathering for Gardner, I made what I thought was a duplicate of the world's first hexaflexagon, from a 17.6 x 210 mm strip of paper, on the unwarranted assumption that Stone cut A4 down to a height of 11 inches, but according to Wikipedia, it was "foolscap" that Stone used in 1939, not A4.

Cutting a 8.5 x 13.5 inch foolscap down to 11 inches would leave a 2.5 x 8.5 inch leftover. A strip of paper 38.1 by 215.9 mm (1.5 x 8.5 in) makes a nice trihexaflexagon, with about 1 cm overlap for gluing or stapling.

So I'm not the only one! :) I, too, constructed my own soma cubes, which can still be found sitting on my desk. The hardest part of the project was finding a simple set of wooden cubes from which to construct. The amazing thing is how few cubes I've had to glue back on after, ummm...., "all those years."

I also constructed a hexa-flexagon around the same time. As I recall it was a hexa-hexa-flexagon and it provided countless hours of entertainment. I think I just taped together strips of paper and I believe it eventually just crumbled away from use, but I can't say I really remember quite what happened to it.

Now I need to remember what other kind of hardware his columns inspired me to construct.

What a great thread!