Abstract  The classical Peg Solitaire was already popular by the time of Louis XIV and was described by Leibniz in 1710. An authoritative account with a annotated bibliography can be found in the comprehensive book of Beasley 1985. The book mentions an engraving of Berey, dated 1697, of a lady with a Solitaire board. Apparently the first theoretical study of the game that was published was done in 1841 by Suremain de Missery. The modern mathematical study of the game dates to the 1960s, when the solitaire cone was first described by Boardman and Conway. We present old and more recent results, most of which can be found in the seminal book of Berlekamp, Conway, and Guy (1982), and highlight combinatorial and geometric interpretations of these results as well as computational approaches.

cv: Antoine Deza, Directeur de Recherche at LRI/CNRS, and the holder of the Digiteo Chair in Combinatorial Optimization, has been a Canada Research Chair in Combinatorial Optimization in the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University. He has been the Head of the Advanced Optimization Laboratory. He has previously held a faculty position at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan.  He has been the Chair of the Fields Institute Industrial Optimization Seminar, the co-organizer of the Fields Institute Thematic Program on Discrete Geometry and Applications, an Associate Editor for Discrete Applied Mathematics, Optimization Letters, and the Journal of Discrete Algorithms, and Guest Editor for four other international journals.