It's a Puzzle: Tangoes Some twenty years ago at the home of friends, I watched a child as she attempted to assemble a seven-piece puzzle. She was completely engrossed by the effort, and I asked her mother about the puzzle, which was unlike I'd ever seen. My friend explained that it was a Tangram, an ancient Chinese puzzle made up of seven pieces, or tans, of various shapes. The goal is to assemble the pieces into various forms: animals, objects, geometric designs. It seems easy but putting the pieces together correctly can be a real challenge. My friend said the puzzle originated hundreds of years ago when a man named Tan dropped a porcelain tile. It broke into seven pieces, and he had a devil of a time fitting them back into their original square shape. As Tan kept reassembling and reordering the pieces, various figures emerged-birds, people, buildings and so on. Legend has it that word of the brainteaser spread, and it became a favorite pastime called Chih-hui-pan, or the Wisdom Board. In the early 1800s, a book of the puzzles appeared in China. The puzzle then spread to Europe, where Napoleon reputedly passed his time working on it with Elba. Lewis Carroll is said to have been so devoted to Tangrams that he carried a book of them at all times. In the early 1900s, Sam Loyd wrote The Eighth Book of Tan, in which he put forth the claim that Tangrams were invented by the God Tan more than four thousand years ago. The puzzle is rumored to have been brought to America by Western sailors who stopped in China during the opium trade. To this day Tangram puzzle problems appear in Chinese newspapers, much as crosswords appear in Western papers. In modern classrooms, math teachers use Tangram puzzles to teach spatial relations, and puzzle devotees can find dozens of versions of the Tangram in books or on web sites. I've also heard a story that traces the Tangrams' origins to a helpless window maker employed by a king. When the artisan dropped the square window he had been commissioned to craft, it broke into seven pieces. As he tried to mend it, a winged horse appeared from the pieces. Each new attempt to mend the window elicited a new creature. Happily the king loved his magic window. For me, I'll stick with Tan and his porcelain tile, but clearly the story of the square broken into seven difficult to realign pieces has enduring resonance.
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