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While reading about the amazing properties of Archimedes’ Stomachion, I wondered whether a mere child’s toy would exhibit such mathematical precision, with each vertex falling on a lattice point of a 12-by-12 grid. Perhaps Archimedes took the basic plan of the toy and tweaked it to see what properties he could induce.

Jeffry D. Mueller
Eldersburg, Md.

Just for kicks, I drew the puzzle in a computer-assisted drawing program and looked at the areas of each one of the shapes.