ABSTRACT
When young people are deciding what subjects to pursue, it’s not the latest research papers that capture their interest, but instead popularizations. Andrew Wiles’s interest in Pierre de Fermat’s Last theorem sprang from a description of it in a book by E. T. Bell. Many other great mathematicians credit Bell for leading them to mathematics. The term Hanoi graph for such representations first appeared in 1986. Many sources say that Ian Stewart, in 1989, was the first to explicitly make the connection between Hanoi graphs and W. Sierpinski’s triangle. From the beginning, there have been variants on the Tower of Hanoi. The Reve’s puzzle with its four pegs is perhaps the most obvious, but it doesn’t require much thought to come up with many more. As the Hanoi graphs for the three-peg version become larger, with the addition of more discs, they can still be drawn in the plane.
