Hexaflexagons
- Autor:
- Jaime Carvalho e Silva, Jana
Hexaflexagon (or TRI-Hexaflexagon) is a paper polygon with a surprising number of faces.
The discovery of the first flexagon, a trihexaflexagon, is credited to the British student Arthur H. Stone, who was studying at Princeton University in the United States in 1939. His new American paper would not fit in his English binder so he cut off the ends of the paper and began folding
them into different shapes. One of these formed a trihexaflexagon. Stone's colleagues Bryant Tuckerman, Richard Feynman, and John Tukey became interested in the idea and formed the Princeton Flexagon Committee. Tuckerman worked out a topological method, called the Tuckerman traverse, for revealing all the faces of a flexagon.
Flexagons were introduced to the general public by the recreational mathematician Martin Gardner in 1956 in the first Mathematical Games column which he wrote for Scientific American magazine. In 1974, the magician Doug Henning included a construct-your-own hexaflexagon with the original cast recording of his Broadway show The Magic Show.
How to build a Hexaflexagon
