The Tangram Book

This first truly comprehensive and beautiful volume on one of the world's most popular and intriguing puzzles comes in two parts. It's an authoritative, lavishly photographed history of Tangrams that reveals the mystery and beauty of this ancient art, and also a masterful introduction to Tangram puzzle-solving, with more than 2,000 all-time puzzles which you can try to solve. This accurate history of this classic Chinese art form comes from a Tangram museum owner and his research team. They discovered many treasures, such as the Tangram sets used by Chinese mathematicians 2,200 years ago to test Pythagorean theorems. You'll see the Tangrams Napoleon played with during his exile. Photos show how to arrange Tangram-shaped antique dinner tables for a variety of themes such as mountain ranges, flower arrangements, and celebration costumes. Among the puzzles for you to solve: "paradoxical pairs" that appear to be identical, but differ in a hard-to-detect detail.