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Following delivery of the December eNews, Peter Shay wrote:

Please unsubscribe me from your list.

I would like to say that you have inspired me and that I have used your ideas to great effect in my classes. However, I have now been moved into teaching English, just English. As such I feel that being subscribed is no longer valid for me.

However, can I also say that it is because of your ideas in teaching Maths that I have now embarked on an educational doctorate in English. I want to incorporate your Mathematical ideas into the teaching of English. Thank you so much for changing the course of my life. I began as an English and Maths teacher and have once again been pushed into purely English.

It is only due to the pressures of teaching a full English load and researching my doctorate that I really do not have the time to do too much else.

I do hope that you continue to inspire Maths and other teachers with your work as you have inspired me.

Towards the end of 2016 Greg Huber, Deputy Director, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP), University of California Santa Barbara wrote:

I found your Sphinx Album online and was really impressed by the progress and engagement students and teachers have made on these sets of problems.

One thing that I could not figure out, though, was what is the current thinking on the total number of Sphinx tilings of Sphinxes of various sizes. The only sequence that I found on the site was this one:

1, 1, 4, 16, 153, ...

(where I've included the tile itself as the Order 1 case) but it wasn't clear to me if the last number, 153, was

1. a known result,
2. just a conjecture, or perhaps
3. a number superseded already by mathematicians who've looked at it.

Would you have any information on the current disposition of this sequence? My curiosity was piqued because a similar shape came up in a different area, and I recalled Martin Gardner writing about the properties of the Sphinx.

Best wishes and congratulations on a creating a very nice global resource.

David was inspired to investigate the number of ways of making a sphinx of a given size (number of tilings) after we asked him to review a proof by Paul Elliott, Year 13, that Sphinxes of any size can be made. Paul had been thinking about the problem for five years. It was first introduced to him in Year 9, at Thorne Grammar School, UK.

We wrote back to Greg explaining that David saw his Size 5 count (which he spent many hours working 'by hand') as a hypothesis; and that as far as we knew no one had taken the investigation any further. We also warned him about the dangers of getting hooked on the The Sphinx. He responded four days later:

OMG ... you were completely correct about the addictive properties of The Sphinx. I woke up in the middle of the night, last night, realizing afterward that what actually roused me was some nightmarish contradiction about where the sphinx center of mass lies.