What I find interesting, however, is that the lessons of the nine dots puzzle are often quickly forgotten when the puzzle is modified. Deliberately challenging your assumptions and allowing yourself to be ‘silly’, at least for a short period, can be a handy strategy for creative problem solving in all walks of life. The solution is a useful metaphor for the challenge of problem solving, when we often become restricted by constraints of our own making. The solution to the nine dot puzzle led to the cliche of ‘thinking outside the box’ (that’s a massive clue to the solution, but if you still can’t find the answer, you’ll find it at the bottom of the article). He called it the Columbus egg puzzle, after an apocryphal story about Christopher Columbus challenging his colleagues to get a boiled egg to stand on its end - a challenge that seemed impossible until Columbus crushed the base of the egg and rested it on its now flat bottom. The puzzle first rose to notoriety when Sam Loyd included it in his 1914 cyclopedia of puzzles.
You’ll have no problem finding a solution with five lines, but in the unlikely event that you’ve never seen this puzzle before, four lines might prove to be a struggle. No tricks are needed, no folding the paper and no using an ultra-fat pen. There are nine dots arranged in a square, and your challenge is to join all the dots using only four straight line strokes of a pen, and with your pen never leaving the paper.
Significant figures: David Singmaster (1938–2023).Do the shuffle: finding π in your playlists.Penguins: the emperors of fluid dynamics.Chalkdust issue 14 – Coming 22 November.
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