After more than three centuries, a geometry problem that originated with a royal bet has been solved.

Imagine you’re holding two equal-size dice. Is it possible to bore a tunnel through one die that’s big enough for the other to slide through?

Perhaps your instinct is to say “Surely not!” If so, you’re not alone. In the late 1600s, an unidentified person placed a bet to that effect with Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Rupert — a nephew of Charles I of England who commanded the Royalist forces in the English Civil War — spent his sunset years studying metallurgy and glassmaking in his laboratory at Windsor Castle.

Rupert won the bet. The mathematician John Wallis, recounting the story in 1693, didn’t say whether Rupert wrote a proof or bored a hole through an actual cube. But Wallis himself proved mathematically that, if you drill a straight tunnel in the direction of one of the cube’s inner diagonals, it can be made wide enough to allow another cube through. It’s a tight squeeze: If you make the second cube just 4% larger, it will no longer fit.

It’s natural to wonder which other shapes have this property. “I think of this problem as being quite canonical,” said Tom Murphy(opens a new tab), a software engineer at Google who has explored the question extensively in his free time. It “would have gotten rediscovered and rediscovered — aliens would have come to this one.”

...read more at quantamagazine.org