Larry D. Nichols Larry D. Nichols Larry D. Nichols, born 1939 in the United States, is a puzzle designer. He grew up in Xenia, Ohio, and studied chemistry at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, before moving to Massachusetts to attend Harvard Graduate School. He is best known for the invention of mechanical puzzles including 'The Nichols Cube Puzzle' (1974), patent US365520. He has lived with his wife Karen in Arlington, Massachusetts since 1959. In 1957, 17 years before Dr. Rubik’s invention popularly known as the “Rubik's Cube”, Dr. Nichols conceived of a twist cube puzzle with six colored faces. It was a 2×2×2
Missing square puzzle under the mark in the upper image, but goes through it in the lower. Overlaying the hypotenuses from both figures results in a very "thin parallelogram" (represented with the four red dots) with an area of exactly one grid square, so the "missing" area. According to Martin Gardner, this particular puzzle was invented by a New York City amateur magician, Paul Curry, in 1953. However, the principle of a dissection paradox has been known since the start of the 16th century. The integer dimensions of the parts of the puzzle (2, 3, 5, 8, 13) are successive Fibonacci numbers, which