In the twilight of his career at Cambridge University, Herbert W. Richmond combined his lifelong interests in geometry and number theory to pose one of the more natural of puzzles in solid dissections: Dissect cubes of edge lengths 3, 4, and 5 to give a cube of edge length 6. The venerable octogenarian produced a dissection with some appealing symmetries, but it used twelve pieces – a rather generous number.

Six years later, John Leech, then a student at Cambridge, latched onto the problem. He challenged the readers of Eureka, the Cambridge undergraduate math journal, to find a dissection that used at most ten pieces, an improvement of two over Richmond's solution. And within a year, the charge of that young generation was complete. Roger Wheeler, also an undergraduate at Cambridge, responded with a dissection that reduced the number of pieces even further, again by two, down to eight!