Six Tastes

This mosaic sock pattern is named for a problem described in a 2000-year-old Indian text. The author describes the six tastes of the Ayurveda (sweet, pungent, astringent, sour, saline, and bitter) and tallies up the numbers of ways one may incorporate different combinations of these tastes at once. In this way, he outlines one of the earliest known problems in combinatorics, a branch of mathematics dealing with the sizes and quantities of finite sets.