Ed: The puzzle is described (and pictured) in The Mathematical Gardner, edited by David Klarner, in an article by D. G. Hoffman called Packing Problems and Inequalities. There's another, older, article by de Brujin (sp?), I think, but I'll have to find it. According to George Miller (see below) Hoffman posed the original packing problem at a conference at Miami university in 1978. At any rate, in the original problem the cuboids just need to satisfy an inequality (sindes a, b, c must be different and the smalles dimension must be larger than (a + b + c) / 4 . Don Knuth asked the question of what happens with equality, and found there are actually 3 different ways to pack 28 cuboids in cube. George Miller made a version of this, called Perfect Packing. He says it will be on his Puzzlepalace.com website, when he gets to it. -- Stan
I have a puzzle by Tom Lensch. 27 AxBxC cuboids, to pack into a cube of side A+B+C. I know I've seen this puzzle written up somewhere, but I can't remember where, now.
I want to add the history to a interactive demonstration I made for the problem: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/BoxPacking/
--Ed Pegg Jr
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