The Puzzle Master

One of them is Emmanuel Giroux, who has been blind since the age of eleven but became a top-notch mathematician. Paraphrasing the fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943), Giroux confidently states: “In geometry, what is essential is invisible to the eye. It is only with the mind that you can see well.”

Throughout his life, Leonardo would remain enchanted by the transformation of shapes. The margins of his notebooks, and sometimes entire pages, would be filled with triangles inside semicircles inside squares inside circles as he played with tricks for turning one geometrical form into another with the same area or volume. He came up with 169 formu

A moment of creative inspiration is rare. It has both a long incubation period and, if it is to prove fruitful, a lengthy subsequent development. We find that the creative experience in science begins with an unconventional person, of abilities both diverse and contrasting, who is well grounded and receptive in his professional field. He not only p

There was something in particular about the way he solved difficult problems, looking them over and coming up with a method—often an irregular method, solving them backward or from the inside out or by finding a trapdoor that was hidden to everyone else—to arrive at an answer in what seemed a few heartbeats.