No label defined (Q4950098)

The history of a most popular riddle for centuries about the river-crossing of a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage is discussed. As is known, this problem occurs first in Alcuin's of York (735-804) collection, probably written around the year 800. The original Latin text is reproduced together with recent translations and earlier versions in German, English, and French, the latter classified sometimes as folk tale. With quotations from Ascher and Bolte's papers, similar problems in African and Red Indians cultures are also dealt with. The author thinks that they were invented independently from the European problem. It is shown that a graph-theoretical description is quite suitable to give an overview of all solutions. Also the sand drawings in Africa and Oceania are considered as the ethnomathematics objects having a graph-theoretic importance, related to the Eulerian graphs connected with the Königsberg bridges problem. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0942.00019].