The Stomachion in Wonderland
Stanley Spencer

Proceedings of Bridges 2015: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture
Pages 295–300
Regular Papers

Abstract

The Walter's Art Museum, Baltimore, has a copy of some work attributed to Archimedes. This includes the description of a Tangram type puzzle, the Stomachion, in the form of a dissected rectangle. This year, 2015, is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice in Wonderland by Charles Dodgson. Dodgson was a Maths Professor at Oxford University, UK. He was interested in the Tangram and wrote literature under the name of Lewis Carroll. This paper examines the geometric properties of a general version of the Stomachion as a parallelogram. A range of designs are created. Examples from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are used to decorate the designs and fractals. The stories are based, loosely, on a pack of cards and a chess set. The shapes from a general Stomachion are used to create designs for a pack of cards and a chess set.

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