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In 1859, the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton devised a puzzle with a regular dodecahedron made of wood. Here is a dodecahedron:
He labelled each of the vertices with the name of an important city. The challenge was to find a route along the edges of the dodecahedron which visited every city exactly once and returned to the start.
Here is a graph which represents the dodecahedron. Can you see how each of the 20 vertices, 30 edges and 12 pentagonal faces is represented in the graph?
I start my journey in Rio de Janeiro and visit all the cities as Hamilton described, passing through Canberra before Madrid, and then returning to Rio. What route could I have taken?
Can you find any other ways of making this journey?
Here is a simpler network of countries:
How many different ways are there of visiting each of these countries once and only once, beginning and ending at Australia?