The mathematical origins of Tetris.

Quite well known.

Computer game.

Andi.

I thought about this because recently, on a holiday in Crete and I was walking down the side.

All these people seven kind of tourist rubbish.

But there's this guy who said in these really interesting, like math and logic puzzles and this one here which I bought.

So this is a puzzle where it is full off these elements here, which these are not quite Tetris, cause Tetris is four squares.

These have five.

So these are five squares.

So these are all the possible ways.

You can put five squares together apart from this and rather brilliantly So there are 12.

123456 789 10 11 12 12 ways.

You couldn't put five squares together, and these are all the possible ones, and it turns out that you can put them all together and there's several ways to do it that they're quite difficult to find.

You can put them in the square and all you need extra is the four by four.

So this is the That's sort of the runt of the family.

You could do it because you know there are 12.

There are five of these, and so five times 12 is what 60 60 and four is 64 which is a bite.

So obviously, you know the numbers are gonna work, and it's just finding it.

And can it work?

The reason why I wanted to buy this is because there is a person who was the first person to discover that you can't get all these things with five squares and into a biggest eight by eight square have his name was Henry do tinny or Henry Earnest student known his friends and friends as Ernest, who was Britain's greatest inventor of puzzles.

I would say the greatest invention of mathematical puzzles the world has ever seen, because the depth and the variety off the mathematical puzzles that he did beat anyone else.

But also Americans would say no, it was Sam lied.

Sam Loyd, their contemporaries.

They actually hated each other where they liked each other than they found that they hated each other.

Where Sam lied, probably did more puzzles, was a bit more of a salesman, and he also did some amazing puzzles.

But you don't find many mathematicians studying Sam Loyd puzzles, but he find still, there are lots of duty puzzles that people are interested in, including this one here.

And this one first appeared in 1907 in a book called The Canterbury Puzzles, which all have Hades historical stories to them And this story Waas so willing.

The Conqueror.

He's the person who came away from Franz and I invaded England, then became king of England, and he had two sons and its sons went to Franz on Stayed with the sun off the French king at the time, it's kind of just sort of slightly a powerful history on apparently got into a fight, and the fight was over.

A game of chess.

Because the British were beating the French blows were given.

Basically, it's obviously I started fighting, and the chessboard is quite of the head of someone and collapsed into 13 different pieces.

And the 13 different pieces that are drawn in the 19 year seven cancer free puzzles are exactly these pieces, and this is the first time in the mathematical literature that you have the selection off all the possible shapes that you can get when you put five or in fact any number, off squares or formally next to each other, so that that they've got to be either straight on dude any also did another puzzle 10 years later, which was all about stamps and folding stamps.

And then he said, What are those little different ways?

You could tear out four stamps together, And that was the first time that there ever the appearance off Tetris blocks.

Because if you have four squares together, that's what Tetris is.

And so do me the first time ever, he did any type of block with the five ones in seven and then 17.

There were four ones.

Now in the 19 sixties, this American mathematician called Solomon Gholam started looking at that and starts to classify them and do lots of maths on them, and he started to call them Polly Dominoes.

So the 51 our pen Tami knows this is the set of the fight of 12 pen.

Tami knows there are tech trauma nose, which are the ones with four on their the trial, my nose.

And then there's the dominoes to the one with the two, and it was because off Solomon Gollum's work in the 19 eighties on Soviet Computer Guy was reading girl arms work which girls were references.

Duties work on dhe basically invented Tetra Tetris, which is the tech trauma nose falling.

You have to stand on.

I'd know this is basically if it was called Petrus.

This is basically what it would be like if I got this because of the hard hit the historical nous off, I thought, Isn't it interesting that this is a very puzzle that began Tetris?

And here I am in Greece and a guy selling it.

And so I bought it, and it is incredibly satisfying to do so.

It would probably take each time you was forget how you stack them.

And each time you do it, it probably takes me about 15 20 minutes, and you think until you've done it, there's no way I'm gonna be able to do it.

And then when you get it, you just do get it on.

Do you sort of work out little techniques, These wonders here like, much more complicated.

It's quite good to put that there.

And there's another one.

This one here gets in the way so I can often start on something like this.

Maybe let's put this in the corner.

It's so soft, tactile, and it's lovely.

And when you get it, it's really, really, really satisfying.

We've made a second video about another famous dude.

Any puzzle, what I want.

I want you to get in there.

Two here in three moves.

Also, if you'd like to see more videos with Alex Bell us or by one of his excellent books about mathematics, including this one about puzzles, there'll be a link down in the video description, thanks to everyone who supports number file on Patriot.

Unlike the people whose names you see on the screen, if you'd like to join them, also, they'll be links down in the description.

Oh, and here's the solution pretty easy.