This showed that common sense had not died out at the county and village level -- though why the unhappy and obviously unbalanced woman was not restrained remains a puzzle.

Although modern scholars have expressed surprise that `` the simple magic square of three '', a mere `` mathematical puzzle '', was able to exert a considerable influence on the minds and imaginations of the cultured Chinese for so many centuries, they could have found most of the answers right within the square itself.

there was much to grok, loose ends to puzzle over and fit into his growing -- all that he had seen and heard and been at the Archangel Foster Tabernacle ( not just cusp when he and Digby had come face to face alone ) why Bishop Senator Boone made him warily uneasy, how Miss Dawn Ardent tasted like a water brother when she was not, the smell of goodness he had incompletely grokked in the jumping up and down and wailing --

# The final piece of the puzzle, thermal transpiration, was theorized by Osborne Reynolds, but first published by James Clerk Maxwell in the last paper before his death in 1879.

The " puzzle " approach was carried even further into ingenious and seemingly impossible plots by John Dickson Carr — also writing as Carter Dickson — who is regarded as the master of the " locked room mystery ", and Cecil Street, who also wrote as John Rhode, whose detective, Dr. Priestley, specialised in elaborate technical devices, while in the US the whodunnit was adopted and extended by Rex Stout and Ellery Queen, among others.

While individual equations present a kind of puzzle and have been considered throughout history, the formulation of general theories of Diophantine equations ( beyond the theory of quadratic forms ) was an achievement of the twentieth century.

In popular culture, this puzzle was the Puzzle No. 142 in Professor Layton and Pandora's Box as one of the hardest solving puzzles in the game, which needed to be unlocked by solving other puzzles first.

The puzzle was originally proposed in 1848 by the chess player Max Bezzel, and over the years, many mathematicians, including Gauss, have worked on this puzzle and its generalized n-queens problem.

If these memories are accurate, then perhaps in 1975 a subtle flaw was introduced into an otherwise commonplace word puzzle.

A somewhat easier ( more symmetrical ) puzzle, the 8 × 8 rectangle with a 2 × 2 hole in the center, was solved by Dana Scott as far back as 1958.

In the New York Times crossword puzzle for June 27, 2012, the clue for an 11-letter word at 37 across was " Complete set of 12 shapes formed by this puzzle's black squares.

Released in late 1983, the game was marketed via the announcement of a cash prize for the first person to solve the puzzle.

The notion of color was necessitated by the puzzle of the.

Originally called the " Magic Cube ", the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Ideal Toy Corp. in 1980 via German businessman Tibor Laczi and Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer, and won the German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle that year.

Samuel Loyd ( January 30, 1841 – April 10, 1911 ), born in Philadelphia and raised in New York, was an American chess player, chess composer, puzzle author, and recreational mathematician.

This is false — Loyd had nothing to do with the invention or popularity of the puzzle, and in any case the craze was in 1880, not the early 1870s:

The puzzle craze that was created by the 15 Puzzle began in January 1880 in the US and in April in Europe.

The craze ended by July 1880 and Sam Loyd's first article about the puzzle was not published until sixteen years later, January 1896.

It was based on a similar puzzle involving dogs published in 1857.

Hamilton ’ s Icosian Game was a recreational puzzle based on finding a Hamiltonian cycle.

Tetris was inspired by a traditional puzzle game named Pentomino, where players would have to arrange falling blocks into lines without any gaps.

When Minesweeper was released with Windows 95, mainstream audiences embraced using a mouse to play puzzle games.

The first is that enforcement of national law in state litigation raises in reverse the old diversity puzzle of the relation of procedure to substance.

* 1924 – Simon & Schuster publishes the first crossword puzzle book.

* 1913 – Arthur Wynne's " word-cross ", the first crossword puzzle, is published in the New York World.

Merriam-Webster, publishers of the leading American dictionaries, first heard of this puzzle in a letter dated March 17, 1975, from Patricia Lasker of Brooklyn, New York.

This puzzle first appears in print in Anita Richterman's " Problem Line " column in Newsday on April 29, 1975.

The first comprehensive historical overview of the-gry puzzle, including a list of 51 words ending in-gry.

Loyd first claimed in 1891 that he invented the puzzle, and he continued until his death a 20 year campaign to falsely take credit for the puzzle.

Skyler Miller of GameSpot argues that Atari Video Cube, also from the same year, " gets my vote as the first true puzzle video game ," involving gameplay similar to a Rubik's Cube in a 2-dimensional space.

Galileo advertised the puzzle to other scientists, including Gaspar Berti who replicated it by building the first water barometer in Rome in 1639.

* December 21 – Arthur Wynne's " word-cross ", the first crossword puzzle, is published in the New York World.

In the 1920s, Harold Murdock of Boston attempted to solve the puzzle of the first shots fired on Lexington Green, and came to the suspicion that the few score militia men who gathered before sunrise to await the arrival of hundreds of well-prepared British soldiers were sent specifically to provoke an incident which could be used for propaganda purposes.

Goring's is often called the " final piece of the puzzle ": a strong two-way player, his presence on the second line ensured that opponents would no longer be able to focus their defensive efforts on the Islanders ' first line of Bossy, Trottier and Clark Gillies.

These newspaper puzzles were almost entirely non-cryptic at first and gradually used more cryptic clues, until the fully cryptic puzzle as known today became widespread.

In Thorndike ’ s learning curve the animals had difficulty escaping at first, but eventually “ caught on ” and escaped faster and faster with each successive puzzle box trial, until they eventually leveled off.

The puzzle box experiments were motivated in part by Thorndike's dislike for statements that animals made use of extraordinary faculties such as insight in their problem solving: " In the first place, most of the books do not give us a psychology, but rather a eulogy of animals.

The first jigsaw puzzle was created around 1760, when John Spilsbury, a British engraver and mapmaker, mounted a map on a sheet of wood that he then sawed around each individual country.

The logic puzzle was first produced by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who is better known under his pen name Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Operant conditioning, sometimes called instrumental learning, was first extensively studied by Edward L. Thorndike ( 1874 – 1949 ), who observed the behavior of cats trying to escape from home-made puzzle boxes.

Treasure maps have taken on numerous permutations in literature and film, such as the stereotypical tattered chart with an over-sized " X " ( as in " X marks the spot ") to denote the treasure's location, first made popular by Robert Louis Stevenson in Treasure Island ( 1883 ), a cryptic puzzle ( in Edgar Allan Poe's " The Gold-Bug " ( 1843 )), or a tattoo as seen in the video game The Space Adventure-Cobra: The Legendary Bandit ( 1991 ) and the film Waterworld ( 1995 ).