Tower of Hanoi
Torres de Hanói
- Date
- 1883 · confidence high
- Place
- Paris, France
- Credited to
- Édouard Lucas
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
French mathematician Édouard Lucas published in 1883, under the commercial pseudonym 'N. Claus (de Siam)', the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, in which a stack of differently sized disks must be moved between three rods without ever placing a larger disk on a smaller one.
Lucas marketed it as a toy accompanied by an invented legend about Buddhist monks moving 64 golden disks, whose solution would take billions of years.
What it led to
- a classic example of recursion and recursive algorithms in computer science
- a common teaching tool for programming and complexity theory
- popularization of the associated legend of the 64-disk 'Tower of Brahma'