Updates to Folderol 1, "A New Wrinkle on an Old Problem",
in Piano-hinged Dissections: Time to Fold!, by Greg N. Frederickson

More open boxes

The box problem has an appeal that will probably never die.
I'll start a list of additional articles that will undoubtedly keep the lid open on this problem:
Catherine M. Miller and Douglas Shaw, "What else can you do with an open box?",
Mathematics Teacher, vol. 100, no. 7 (March 2007), pp. 470-474.

Information about Paul Hardy

For those who were entranced by Paul Hardy's illustration on page 84, there is a bit of a back-story associated with the man who drew that illustration. He was baptized as David Paul Frederick Hardy in August 1862 and lived until January 1942. Dudeney had first posed the cistern-making puzzle in 1903 in The Weekly Dispatch. As I noted on page 83, Hardy drew the picturesque illustration that accompanied the rephrased version of Dudeney's puzzle when it appeared in Cassell's Magazine in 1908. What I didn't note is that Hardy was the ``David'' who had had an affair with Dudeney's wife Alice, which nearly torpedoed the Dudeney marriage in 1913.
As discussed by Diana Crick in her editorial notes for A Lewes Diary 1916-1944 by Mrs. Henry Dudeney, Tartarus Press (1998), Hardy was Mrs. Dudeney's lover, referred to as just ``David'' (to avoid embarassment to his descendants).
Note that the initials "PH" are not to be found when the illustration graced the page of the revised puzzle in Dudeney's 1917 book Amusements in Mathematics. Can we conclude that Dudeney deliberately scotched this reference to the man who drove a wedge into his marriage?


Copyright 2019, Greg N. Frederickson.
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Last updated April 8, 2019.