Updated 16 October 2026 23:13
Master Sun’s problem—first posed by Sun Bin, a Chinese military strategist and supposed descendent of Sun Tzu, the legendary author of “The Art of War”—is an ancient strategy question whose elegant simplicity conceals a fiendishly difficult mathematical puzzle.
The problem was largely ignored for 2,000 years until a college friend of Dana Mackenzie revived it—and in doing so, rekindled Mackenzie’s passion for mathematics.
“Master Sun’s Problem” is Mackenzie’s entertaining account of how, to his own amazement, he solved this tantalizing problem.