[1] These six extra triangles partially cover ABC, and leave six overhanging extra triangles lying outside ABC.
Focusing on the parallelism of the full construction (offered by Martin Gardner through James Randi’s on-line magazine), the pair-wise congruences of overhanging and missing pieces of ABC is evident.
As seen in the graphical solution, six plus the original equals the whole triangle ABC.
[2] An early exhibit of this geometrical construction and area computation was given by Robert Potts in 1859 in his Euclidean geometry textbook.
[3] According to Cook and Wood (2004), this triangle puzzled Richard Feynman in a dinner conversation; they go on to give four different proofs.