You can play it by hand using a sheet of hexagon graph paper, or you can play against a computer online, here. Speaking of hexagons, have you ever played the game Hex? It’s a two-player game in which players take turns claiming hexagons on a hexagonally-tiled board, trying to create a connected path from one end of the board to the other. Want to learn more about hexagons? Here’s a website devoted entirely to the geometry of hexagons! Or, watch this snippet about bees and their hexagonal honeycombs from the BBC. It remained a conjecture until 1999 when a mathematician named Thomas Hales finally proved it! You can read a summary of his proof here. Thousands of years ago, an ancient Roman scholar named Marcus Terrentius Varro conjectured that the hexagon is the shape that most efficiently breaks flat space up into little units – making honeycombs that hold the most amount of honey while using the least amount of wax. NPR’s Robert Krulwich wrote about this in a recent post on his excellent science blog, Krulwich Wonders. I think the explanation is an amazing example of how the natural world often follows mathematical rules perfectly. Each little cell is a perfect hexagon – and all bees build this way. People can be skeptical when some mathematicians and scientists talk about mathematics as the “mysterious code” that “underpins the world.” I mean, the natural world is so chaotic! But then you run across this:
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