A New Puzzle Turns Earth Into a Rubik’s Cube, but More Complex Continental Drift is one of Henry Segerman’s latest efforts to make mathematics “real.” Henry Segerman, a British American mathematician and mathematical artist at Oklahoma State University, is motivated by a question: “Take a mathematical idea, can you make it real?”Credit...Brett Deering for The New York Times Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month.Maker math Dr. Segerman’s more formal investigations are in topology, the study of geometric objects without regard for lengths or angles.Together, the brothers’ creative process is to ask of everything, “But what if…?” Whenever Dr. Segerman mentions a new project, it is invariably “very, very clever,” said Mr. Segerman, who nonetheless looks to poke holes.Two classes of shapes work, they proved: “boring parallelograms” and “surprising cyclic quadrilaterals,” cyclic meaning that all vertexes of a quadrilateral lie on a circle.In a YouTube comment, a viewer suggested that this mechanism would serve as “one hell of a back-scratcher.” Also consider the Countdown d24, a 24-sided die that is the latest invention to emerge from the Dice Lab, a business partnership with Robert Fathauer, a mathematical artist and puzzle designer in Apache Junction, Ariz."