Symmetric Stick Puzzles

George W. Hart




This page collects some material on puzzles made from symmetrically arranged sticks.  In the above example, the thirty sticks are positioned on the edges of a dodecahedron, but rotated consistently. The general idea is described in this paper which appeared in the Bridges 2011 conference:

     G. Hart, "Symmetric Stick Puzzles," Proceedings of Bridges Conference, 2011, pp. 357-364.  (online PDF)

The paper describes software in Mathematica for generating your own puzzles, which is available here.

The stl file for the above design is available on my makerbot page.

Some related stick-based puzzles based on the same underlying ideas and made with the same software are:
And I have other types of puzzle designs online here.