2026-07-29 · history
Pentomino (1965) — How Solomon Golomb's Five-Square Shape Became Tetris
In 1965, American mathematician Solomon W. Golomb published Polyominoes, a book that gathered the theory of the twelve five-square shapes known as pentominoes. The naming traces back to a 1953 Harvard lecture; Martin Gardner's column carried it to general readers in 1957; a Russian translation appeared in 1975. Then in 1984, a young Moscow computer scientist named Alexey Pajitnov, drawing on his own childhood memories of pentominoes, moved shapes on an experimental computer, and Tetris was born. This piece traces the more than thirty years it took a five-square shape to travel the world.
