Math Puzzles

Pentominos



A pentomino is a polyomino composed of five (Ancient Greek πέντε / pénte) congruent squares, connected along their edges (which sometimes is said to be an orthogonal connection).

There are 12 different free pentominoes, often named after the letters of the Latin alphabet that they vaguely resemble. The F, L, N, P, Y, and Z pentominoes are chiral in two dimensions; adding their reflections (F', J, N', Q, Y', S) brings the number of one-sided pentominoes to 18. The others, lettered I, T, U, V, W, and X, are equivalent to some rotation of their mirror images.

Each of the twelve pentominoes can be tiled to fill the plane. In addition, each chiral pentomino can be tiled without using its reflection.


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A standard pentomino puzzle is to tile, cover a rectangular plane without overlap or gaps a rectangular box with the pentominoes.

Each of the 12 pentominoes has an area of 5 unit squares, so the plane that they cover has an area of 60 units. Possible sizes are 6 x 10, 5 x 12, 4 x 15 and 3 x 20. The avid puzzler can probably solve these problems by hand within a few hours. A more challenging task, typically requiring a computer search, is to count the total number of solutions in each case.

There are exactly 2339 solutions to solving a 6x10 case.

1010 solutions to 5 x 12.

368 solutions to the 4 x 15 case.

2 solutions to 3 x 20.

Objective

Your goal is to build pentomino forms.