ABSTRACT
An early fad of recreational mathematics occurred near the turn of the seventeenth century, when the one-person game “solitaire” swept through the French nobility in the court of Louis XIV. The evidence for this popular craze can be found in the art of the period. An engraving by Claude-Auguste Berey, dated 1697, depicts Princess Soubise posing by a board of the shape shown in Figure 1(a), and several other artists documented a similar scene [1]. These engravings are the earliest known references to the oneperson game or puzzle now known as “peg solitaire.”
