I gave a the kick-off Basic Notions talk at ICTP in 2014 on Impartial Games (one of the topics of the course Math, Puzzles and Computers). I expected students in the class to connect to puzzles and eventually to the corresponding mathematics through a chilhood experience. It is certainly what happened to me while preparing the lectures. I have a somewhat vague but powerful memory of being introduced to the standard version of the game of Nim at an early age.

These are the slides of a talk I gave in the UT Odyssey public lecture series in 2007. It was a partly historical talk on the way certain puzzles seem to grab the public’s attention and become an obsession for a period of time, Rubik’s cube being a classic example of the recent past. Another wildly popular puzzle was the Famous Trick Donkeys 1858 puzzle by Sam Lloyd. The original links on the slides don’t seem to work anymore.

In the early 2000’s while monkeying around with lattice polygons, I came up with a puzzle that looked interesting. I named it Blet after my daughter Malena saying one day out of the blue: Blet, suena como un tomat. (To this day nobody can really figure out what she meant by it.) I discussed the puzzle with my then colleagues at UT, Austin, Felipe Voloch and Lorenzo Sadun, and together worked out pretty much the whole thing and published the results.