Willem Abraham Wythoff Created 2026-10-24 Updated 2026-11-05
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Willem Abraham Wythoff, also spelled Willem Abraham Wijthoff, worked on combinatorial game theory and the geometry of polytopes. His1907 modification of Nim became Wythoff's game. His work also included a published proof of the triangle-free graph bound associated with Willem Mantel.[ref] The game illustrates how a small change to legal moves can replace a binary-arithmetic strategy by one organized through Beatty sequences and the golden ratio. His geometric work concerns the symmetry and construction of higher-dimensional polytopes, rather than only recreational games.
Figure 1.
Portrait of Willem Abraham Wythoff
. Indisch Thee en Familiearchief (source photograph, credited on Commons); photographer and crop creator not established. Public domain (source photograph, as marked on Commons). Source usage terms, via Wikimedia Commons. Source.
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