Lobachevsky 2024

In 1792, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, the Russian mathematician and geometer was born.

In 1953, Tom Lehrer borrowed Lobachevsky's name for a song inspired by Danny Kaye's Constantin Stanislavski routine, with the subject changed from acting to mathematics, and in particular to plagiarism in mathematics. (Lobachevsky's name was chosen purely because it had the right number of syllables and fit the rhythm.) In the song is the lyric: "I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk, whose friend in Omsk has friend in Tomsk with friend in Akmolinsk. His friend in Alexandrovsk has friend in Petropavlovsk, whose friend somehow is solving now the problem in Dnepropetrovsk."

In 2002, this game was designed to turn that series of connections into a game.

In 2022, Tom Lehrer put all of his works into the public domain.

Now in 2024, that act has inspired the release of this game into the public domain.

In Lobachevsky, players collect friend cards from seven stacks to try to build a collection of friends all of the way to Dnepropetrovsk. Along the way players can publish papers to build up or refine their collection of friends, can extend the work of other publications, and can even request help from other players to fill gaps in their own research strings. Whoever can publish results researched from Dnepropetrovsk first wins.

—description from the designer