Bad at puzzles, I watched LayerQ play Understand

Tower of Hanoi (1883) — The 64 Disks That Never End, and the Legacy of Recursion

In 1883 the French mathematician Édouard Lucas released a small wooden toy under the pseudonym 'N. Claus (de Siam).' Three pegs, disks of differing size, and just two rules. Yet beneath that plain surface lay the mathematics of recursion: moving n disks demands a minimum of 2^n−1 moves. This essay revisits the toy's true origin, the fabricated Benares legend in which the world ends when 64 disks are moved, and what the ideas of 'recursion' and 'state space' bequeathed to later computer science and to puzzle design today.