The Tangram Book: The Story of the Chinese Puzzle with Over 2000 Puzzles to Solve

by Jerry Slocum, Jacob Botermans, Dieter Gebhardt

With its exquisite photographs and richly informative text, this is simply the best, the most unique, and the most in-depth study of the ancient and popular Chinese puzzle game.

This first truly comprehensive and beautiful volume on one of the world’s most popular and intriguing puzzles is an authoritative, lavishly photographed history of tangrams, and also a masterful introduction to puzzle solving, with more than 2,000 all-time tangrams. This accurate history of the classic Chinese art form comes from a tangram museum owner and his research team, who discovered many treasures, such as the tangram sets used by Chinese mathematicians 2,200 years ago to test Pythagorean theorems. Photos show how to arrange tangram-shaped antique dinner tables for a variety of themes such as mountain ranges and celebration costumes. Among the puzzles for you to Paradoxical Pairs that appear to be identical but differ in a hard-to-detect detail.

Genres: Reference, Puzzles, Mathematics

192 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2003

Reviews

[Jim D'Ambrosia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful pictures of tangram sets and tangram-related art over the centuries. The last half of the book is a catalog of some 1,700 puzzles. If you like tangrams, then you will love looking at this. Unfortunately, it doesn't really have much in the way of analysis, which is what I was looking for. I did learn that the word "tangram" applies to that very specific seven-piece puzzle, and is not a generic term for similar rearrangement puzzles. I also learned that the oldest rearrangement, invented by the Greeks way back when, is something called a "stomachion", which is a fantastic word.

[Eric Sullenberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this years ago when I started teaching, read it, and have had it on my shelf in my class for my students ever since. I've not finished all of the puzzles, but my students enjoy tackling them on occasion.

[Ernest · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book about the fiendish 7 piece puzzle. The author clearly has a deep love of the subject and has not only invested a lot of time and effort into tracking down the history and exposing some myths of the tangram, but explains the process of the research he made and the assistance he received from others. Where he assumed, he clearly set out his inferences and reasoning.

Lest anyone think this is an academic text, the glossy pages are filled with colour pictures that superbly show the old texts and puzzles that he describes. There are also 173 tangram puzzles with solutions which, although I did not try all, are varied in shapes and difficulty. In short, this is a beautiful book that would be suitable as a coffee table book, to read to explore the interesting history and to try the tangram puzzles.