Martin Gardner in the Twenty-First Century

Michael Henle
Brain Hopkins

Abstract

Georgia Southern University faculty members Ionut E. Iacob, T. Bruce McLean and Hua Wang co-authored “The V-flex, Triangle Orientation, and Catalan Numbers in Hexaflexagons” in the publication Martin Gardner in the Twenty-First Century.

Chapter Summary: Regular hexaflexagons mysteriously change faces as you pinch flex them. This paper describes a different flex, the V-flex, which allows the hexahexaflexagon (with only 9 faces under the pinch flex) to have 3420 faces. The article goes on to explain the classification of triangle orientations in a hexaflexagon and to give an example of flexagon combinatorics.