Puzzles
Eight queens, one chessboard, zero attacks
Place eight queens on a standard 8×8 chessboard so that no two threaten each other — no two may share a row, a column, or a diagonal. How many different ways can it be done?
Reveal the answer
Ninety-two arrangements work, though only twelve are fundamentally distinct once rotations and mirror images are discounted. Chess problemist Max Bezzel posed the puzzle in 1848; Franz Nauck published the first full solutions in 1850. An 1874 article wrongly credited it to Carl Friedrich Gauss — a mix-up historians still cite as a case study in how errors get repeated as fact.