Tangram

    The tangram is a puzzle originated in China.  One documentation on tangram is recorded in a Chinese book dated 1813.  Known to the Chinese as the "wisdom puzzle", it has been a well-known puzzle to the western world since the 19th century.  Well-known people, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Napoleon, H.E.Dudeney, and Sam Loyd have all shown great interest in tangrams.

    The tangram puzzle set is composed of seven pieces.  One of the piece is a square, another piece is a rhomboid, and the other five pieces are isosceles right triangles of various sizes.  Of these triangular pieces, two are small size triangles, one is a medium sized triangle and and two are large size  triangle.  The area of a large size triangle is twice the area of the medium size triangle.  The area of the medium size triangle is twice the area of an small size triangle. The area of the square is also twice the area of an small size triangle.  The area of the rhomboid is the same as that of the square.  All the angles in these pieces are either 45, 90 or 135 degrees.  Making a tangram set from a piece of square board is easy.

    The instructions for playing tangrams are simple and very easy to understand.  The objective of the puzzle is to form a figure using the tangram pieces.  People find this seven-piece tangram puzzle fascinating and delightful because there are a large variety of ways of putting these pieces together.  Using one's own creativity, various tangram figures may be formed.  In fact, thousands and thousands of designs have been created over the years by just rearranging these seven tangram pieces.  These designs not only include simple geometric shapes shown below, but also shapes of different animals, such as birds, dogs, and cat.  The designs also include numerous other shapes of popular objects.

One of the popular books on Tangrams is the "Eighth Book of Tan" by Sam Loyd, an american puzzle expert.  This book contains arount 700 tangram patterns.  Lyod called this the "eight" book because he claimed that about four thousand years ago, a Chinese name Tan had compiled seven books on Tangrams.

Solve these tangram puzzles:

Next:  Making Your Own Tangram Set

Tangram Corner

Large Tangram Tangram Puzzle Set