Forty-two perplexing puzzles by creator of Alice in Wonderland: Cakes in a Row, Looking-Glass Time, Arithmetical Croquet, Diverse Doublets, and others. Hints, solutions. Illustrations by John Tenniel.
This book contains scores of intriguing puzzles and paradoxes from Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, whose interests ranged from inventing new games like Arithmetical Croquet to important problems in symbolic logic and propositional calculus. Written by Carroll expert and well-known mathematics author Martin Gardner, this tour through Carroll's inventions is both fun and informative.
This challenging collection of 42 mathematical mind-benders, compiled by a noted Lewis Carroll scholar, includes Castle Croquet, A Sticky but Polished Riddle, Who's Coming to Dinner?, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Eligible Apartments, Predicting the Total, and more. Includes complete solutions and drawings by John Tenniel, the original illustrator of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Take a trip down the rabbit hole into a wondrous world of riddles and enigmas. In this fabulous collection you will discover a host of challenging puzzles, some will be familiar, while others are curiouser... and curiouser.
British-Israeli recreational mathematician, communicator and educator, Yossi Elran explores in-depth six of the most ingenious math puzzles, exposing their long 'tails': the stories, trivia, quirks and oddities of their history and, of course, the math and mathematicians behind them. In his unique 'talmudic', associative way, Elran shows the hidden connections between Lewis Carroll's 'Cats and Rats' puzzle and the math of taxi driving, a number pyramid magic trick and Hollywood movie fractals, and even how packing puzzles are related to COVID-19!Elran has a great talent for explaining difficult topics — including quantum mechanics, a topic he relates to some original 'operator' puzzles — making the book very accessible for all audiences.With over 40 additional, original puzzles, and touching on dozens of hot math topics, this is a perfect book for math lovers, educators, kids and adults, and anyone who loves a great read.Yossi Elran is co-author of our bestselling The Paper Puzzle Book, and heads the Innovation Center at the Davidson Institute of Science Education, the educational arm of the world-renowned Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
Lewis Carroll's books have delighted children and adults for generations, but behind their exuberant fantasy and delightful nonsense was the mind of a brilliant mathematician. Now his forgotten achievements in the world of numbers are brought to light by acclaimed author and mathematician Robin Wilson. Here he explores the curious imagination of a man whose pioneering work at Oxford University included investigations into voting patterns and tennis seeding, who dreamt up numerical conundrums in bed at night and who filled his writings with problems, paradoxes, puzzles and teasing games of logic. Taking us into a world of mock turtles and maps, gryphons and gravity, Lewis Carroll in Numberland reveals the singular mind of a genius.
A lively and engaging look at logic puzzles and their role in mathematics, philosophy, and recreation Logic puzzles were first introduced to the public by Lewis Carroll in the late nineteenth century and have been popular ever since. Games like Sudoku and Mastermind are fun and engrossing recreational activities, but they also share deep foundations in mathematical logic and are worthy of serious intellectual inquiry. Games for Your Mind explores the history and future of logic puzzles while enabling you to test your skill against a variety of puzzles yourself. In this informative and entertaining book, Jason Rosenhouse begins by introducing readers to logic and logic puzzles and goes on to reveal the rich history of these puzzles. He shows how Carroll's puzzles presented Aristotelian logic as a game for children, yet also informed his scholarly work on logic. He reveals how another pioneer of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan, drew on classic puzzles about liars and truthtellers to illustrate Kurt Gödel's theorems and illuminate profound questions in mathematical logic. Rosenhouse then presents a new vision for the future of logic puzzles based on nonclassical logic, which is used today in computer science and automated reasoning to manipulate large and sometimes contradictory sets of data. Featuring a wealth of sample puzzles ranging from simple to extremely challenging, this lively and engaging book brings together many of the most ingenious puzzles ever devised, including the "Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever," metapuzzles, paradoxes, and the logic puzzles in detective stories.
"Lewis Carroll is known mainly for his children's novels and poems. Throughout these ingenious works he interspersed riddles, math and logic games, and a host of other puzzles, reflecting his interest in the ludic (playful) imagination. It is not widely known that Carroll is one of the greatest puzzle makers of history, composing them not only for children, but also for adults in magazines, periodicals, and books. One of his puzzle masterpieces is the so-called doublet puzzle, which he wrote for Vanity Fair, and is still one of the most loved wordplay games to this day. There have been various anthologies of Carroll's puzzles in recent decades, but virtually no study of their importance as part of a unique "puzzle art" exists. This book aims to examine this art as it manifests itself in Carroll's many puzzle creations, both within his novels, and in his many other writings. It dissects the blend of logic and imagination that he employs in creating riddles, anagrams, acrostics, math puzzles, logic games, and a host of other puzzle genres-all of which are discussed in the book. The main theme is that Carroll's literary writings cannot be truly grasped without taking into account his puzzle art"--