The Tower of Hanoi Legend
In the great temple at Benares beneath the dome which marks
the center of the world, rests a brass plate in which are fixed three
diamond needles, each a cubit high and as thick as the body of a bee. On
one of these needles, at the creation, God placed sixty-four disks of pure
gold, the largest disk resting on the brass plate, and the others getting
smaller and smaller up to the top one. This is the Tower of Bramah. Day
and night unceasingly the priests transfer the disks from one diamond
needle to another according to the fixed and immutable laws of Bramah,
which require that the priest on duty must not move more than one disk at
a time and that he must place this disk on a needle so that there is no
smaller disk below it. When the sixty-four disks shall have been thus
transferred from the needle on which at the creation God placed them to
one of the other needles, tower, temple, and Brahmans alike will crumble
into dust, and with a thunderclap the world will vanish.
This story was created by the French mathematician, De Parville,
in 1884.
See also The Tower of Hanoi
References
W.W. Rouse Ball & H.S.M. Coxeter,
Mathematical Recreations and Essays, 12th edition. Univ.
of Toronto Press, 1974.
De Parville, La Nature, Paris, 1884, part I, pp. 285-286.