This book includes 110 puzzles, not as individual problems but as incidents in connected stories. The first 31 are amusingly posed by pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Additional puzzles are presented using different characters. Many require only the ability to exercise logical or visual skills; others offer a stimulating challenge to the mathematically advanced.
This compilation of long-inaccessible puzzles by a famous puzzle master offers challenges ranging from arithmetical and algebraical problems to those involving geometry, combinatorics, and topology, plus game, domino, and match puzzles. Includes answers.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Canterbury Puzzles, and Other Curious Problems" by Henry Ernest Dudeney. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Mathematical Recreations and Essays W. W. Rouse Ball For nearly a century, this sparkling classic has provided stimulating hours of entertainment to the mathematically inclined. The problems posed here often involve fundamental mathematical methods and notions, but their chief appeal is their capacity to tease and delight. In these pages you will find scores of "recreations" to amuse you and to challenge your problem-solving faculties-often to the limit. Now in its 13th edition, Mathematical Recreations and Essays has been thoroughly revised and updated over the decades since its first publication in 1892. This latest edition retains all the remarkable character of the original, but the terminology and treatment of some problems have been updated and new material has been added. Among the challenges in store for you: Arithmetical and geometrical recreations; Polyhedra; Chess-board recreations; Magic squares; Map-coloring problems; Unicursal problems; Cryptography and cryptanalysis; Calculating prodigies; ... and more. You'll even find problems which mathematical ingenuity can solve but the computer cannot. No knowledge of calculus or analytic geometry is necessary to enjoy these games and puzzles. With basic mathematical skills and the desire to meet a challenge you can put yourself to the test and win. "A must to add to your mathematics library."-The Mathematics Teacher We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.
The Canterbury Puzzles By Henry Ernest Dudeney Puzzles have such an infinite variety that it is sometimes very difficult to divide them into distinct classes. They often so merge in character that the best we can do is to sort them into a few broad types. Let us take three or four examples in illustration of what I mean.
Polyominoes will delight not only students and teachers of mathematics at all levels, but will be appreciated by anyone who likes a good geometric challenge. There are no prerequisites. If you like jigsaw puzzles, or if you hate jigsaw puzzles but have ever wondered about the pattern of some floor tiling, there is much here to interest you. A polyomino is a shape cut along the lines from square graph paper; the pronunciation of polyomino begins as does polygon and ends as does domino. Tilings, also called tessellations of mosaic patterns, are older than civilization itself. Tiling with polyominoes provides challenges that range from the popular jigsaw-like puzzles to easily understood mathematical research problems. You will find unsolved puzzles and problems of both kinds here. Answers are provided for most of the problems that have known solutions. It is only fair to repeat here the warning stated in the preface to this book, "Playing with polyominoes can be habit forming."
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games columns in Scientific American inspired and entertained several generations of mathematicians and scientists. Gardner in his crystal-clear prose illuminated corners of mathematics, especially recreational mathematics, that most people had no idea existed. His playful spirit and inquisitive nature invite the reader into an exploration of beautiful mathematical ideas along with him. These columns were both a revelation and a gift when he wrote them; no one--before Gardner--had written about mathematics like this. They continue to be a marvel. This volume, originally published in 1959, contains the first sixteen columns published in the magazine from 1956-1958. They were reviewed and briefly updated by Gardner for this 1988 edition.
