John and Jane Kostick use magnets to create fascinating geometric puzzles.
John W. Lewman Toy Designer www.toymakerpress.com
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The Museum says: People have been making geometric puzzles for centuries, with each design adding new twists. At The Museum of Mathematics, we have a large puzzle called the tetraxis, shown below. The name comes from the fact that the pieces line up along four axes. Most people are familiar with the 90 degree relationship between the standard XYZ axes, but are confounded by these parts, which line up in the directions of the four long diagonals of a cube. This puzzle was made by John and Jane Kostick, who incorporated magnets to make the parts lock together nicely. The outer shape comes from a family of related puzzles by Stewart Coffin, whose book The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections, gives instructions for woodworkers on making their own copies of many geometric puzzles. Read More.
![tetraxis[1]](http://toywizard.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/tetraxis1.jpg "tetraxis[1]")
