2026-08-02 · history
Soma Cube (1933) — Twenty-Seven Fragments Born in a Quantum Mechanics Lecture
In 1933, half-listening to a lecture on quantum mechanics in Copenhagen, Piet Hein enumerated every non-convex fragment that could be made by joining four or fewer unit cubes by their faces, and produced the seven-piece, 27-cube Soma cube. Popularized worldwide by Martin Gardner's 1958 column and commercialized by Parker Brothers in 1969, its 240 solutions were later hand-solved by John Conway and Michael Guy, and its debt is acknowledged by none other than Rubik's Cube inventor Erno Rubik. This piece traces ninety years of a solid-dissection puzzle lineage.
