I bought a calendar for Keigan...... and it has one for each day of the year.
The tangram (Chinese: 七巧板; pinyin: qī qiǎo bǎn; literally "seven boards of skill") is a dissection puzzle consisting of seven flat shapes, called tans, which are put together to form shapes. The objective of the puzzle is to form a specific shape (given only in outline or silhouette) using all seven pieces, which may not overlap.
The Tangram may have roots in the yanjitu (燕几圖) furniture set of the Song Dynasty. This furniture set saw some variation during the Ming Dynasty, and later became a set of wooden blocks for playing.
While the tangram is often said to be ancient, the earliest known printed reference to tangrams appears in a Chinese book dated 1813, which was probably written during the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor.[1]
The tans are often stored as a rectangleThe tangram's existence in the West has been verified to no earlier than the early 19th century, when they were brought to America on Chinese and American ships. The earliest known example, given to the son of an American ship owner in 1802, is made of ivory and has a silk box.[citation needed]
The word tangram was first used in 1848 by Thomas Hill, later President of Harvard University, in his book Geometrical Puzzle for the Youth.
The author and mathematician Lewis Carroll reputedly was a tangram enthusiast and owned a Chinese book with tissue-thin pages containing 323 tangram designs. Napoleon is said[by whom?] to have owned a tangram set and Chinese problem and solution books during his exile on the island of St. Helena, although this has been contested by Ronald C. Read. Photos[of what?] are shown in The Tangram Book by Jerry Slocum.
Sam Loyd's 1903 spoof of tangram history, The Eighth Book Of Tan, claims that the game was invented 4,000 years ago by a god named Tan. The book included 700 shapes, some of which are impossible to solve. [2]
