Re: [HM] Prince Rupert's Problem
Barry Cipra (cipra@microassist.com)
Thu, 19 Aug 1999 21:23:33 -0500 (CDT)
In "The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Puzzles" David Wells
writes "Prince Rupert was a nephew of Charles I of England, a soldier
in the Civil War and an inventor and early member of the Royal
Society." There is a chronology of recreational mathematics, by David
Singmaster, at
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/9174/recchron.html
which says the problem was first published in 1685, in Wallis's De
Algebra Tractatus. There's also information in Singmaster's Sources
in Recreational Mathematics at
http://members.it.tripod.de/catur/singmast/intro.htm
Barry Cipra
cipra@microassist.com