The Tower of Hanoi was invented by French mathematician Édouard Lucas in 1883.
The Legend of Benares
Accompanying the puzzle was a myth about a temple in India containing a large room with three time-worn posts and 64 golden disks. Priests have been moving these disks since the beginning of time. According to the legend, when the last move is completed, the world will end.
The Mathematics
The minimum number of moves required to solve the puzzle is exactly 2ⁿ - 1, where n is the number of disks.
If the priests in the legend moved one disk per second without ever making a mistake, it would take them 585 billion years to finish!