Soma cube

Though this blog mainly concentrates on logical puzzles, this post is about the Soma Cube, invented by Danish scientist Piet Hein in 1933 during a lecture on quantum physics. The name SOMA may be related to the name of an array.

It is a solid dissection puzzle, where a 3x3x3 cube is divided into 7 pieces:

You can easily create your own set with a saw and some wood glue.

The Soma cube has been discussed in detail by Martin Gardner and John Horton Conway, and the book Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays contains a detailed analysis of the Soma cube problem. There are 240 distinct solutions of the Soma cube puzzle, excluding rotations and reflections.

Piet Hein also published or authorized a booklet with puzzles. I found a copy here. However, I found 2 figures with a number of blocks less than 27, so I have discarded them and added two of the problems listed below in this file.

Here are some problems I did not find elsewhere on the web:
1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

6)
(Thanks go to fellow consultant Harrie Jans for this one!)
7)

8)

Many people noticed that the pieces used are not all tetracubes, and the tricube is a strange duck in the pond. In response several people have suggested something dubbed Soma+, but that is a subject for a different post in this blog.

There is an awful lot of literature on the web. Here are some links:
* Thorleif Bundgaard collected a very nice and very extensive collection of figures which can be made with the soma cube pieces.
* Chapter 24: Pursuing Puzzles Purposefully from the book “Winning Ways II “
* Article on english wikipedia on soma cube
* Article on englsih wikipedia on tetrominoes
* List of figures
* All 240 solutions to the cube
* Instructions for making a soma cube

If you solved it, we have the solution to nr 1, nr 2, nr 3, nr 4, nr 5, nr 6, nr 7, and nr 8