When we arrived at the MathsJam last Tuesday, we heard a couple of people speak Russian. One of them turned out to be a well known Russian puzzle inventor Vladimir Krasnoukhov, who presented us with one colorful puzzle after another, seemingly producing them out of thin air. What a feast! Simon got extremely excited about several puzzles, especially one elegant three-piece figure (that turned out to have no possible solution, and that’s what Simon found particularly appealing) and a cube that required graph theory to solve it (Simon has tried solving the latter in Wolfram Mathematica after we got home, but hasn’t succeeded so far).
Vladimir told us he had been making puzzles for over 30 years and had more than 4 thousand puzzles at home. Humble and electricized with childlike enthusiasm, he explained every puzzle he gave to Simon, but without imposing questions or overbearing instructions. He didn’t even want a thank-you for all his generosity!
Vladimir also gave us two issues of the Russian kids science magazine Kvantik, with his articles published in them. One of the articles was an April fools joke about trying to construct a Penrose impossible triangle and asked to spot the step where the mistake was hidden:
Simon was very enthusiastic about trying to actually physically follow the steps, even though he realized it would get impossible at some point:
Simon’s also working on other math problems from the magazine, so more blog posts about Kvantik will follow. We’re very happy to have discovered the website https://kvantik.com
You can find out more about Vladimir Krasnoukhov’s puzzles on planetagolovolomok.ru
Geeks out of the box 