Soma cube

The Soma cube is a solid dissection puzzle invented by Danish polymath Piet Hein in 1933[1] during a lecture on quantum mechanics conducted by Werner Heisenberg.

The Soma cube was popularized by Martin Gardner in the September 1958 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

The book Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays also contains a detailed analysis of the Soma cube problem.

[3] The seven Soma pieces are six polycubes of order four, and one of order three: Piet Hein authorized a finely crafted rosewood version of the Soma cube manufactured by Theodor Skjøde Knudsen's company Skjøde Skjern (of Denmark).

Plastic Soma cube sets were also commercially produced by Parker Brothers in several colors (blue, red, and orange) during the 1970s.

Solving the Soma cube has been used as a task to measure individuals' performance and effort in a series of psychology experiments.

For example, In 1969, Edward Deci, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate assistant at the time,[5] asked his research subjects to solve a soma cube under conditions with varying incentives in his dissertation work on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation establishing the social psychological theory of crowding out.

[6] Similar to Soma cube is the 3D pentomino puzzle, which can fill boxes of 2×3×10, 2×5×6 and 3×4×5 units.