Entertaining Mathematical Puzzles

by Martin Gardner

Overview

Playing with mathematical riddles can be an intriguing and fun-filled pastime — as popular science writer Martin Gardner proves in this entertaining collection. Puzzlists need only an elementary knowledge of math and a will to resist looking up the answer before trying to solve a problem.
Written in a light and witty style, Entertaining Mathematical Puzzles is a mixture of old and new riddles, grouped into sections that cover a variety of mathematical topics: money, speed, plane and solid geometry, probability, topology, tricky puzzles, and more. The probability section, for example, points out that everything we do, everything that happens around us, obeys the laws of probability; geometry puzzles test our ability to think pictorially and often, in more than one dimension; while topology, among the "youngest and rowdiest branches of modern geometry," offers a glimpse into a strange dimension where properties remain unchanged, no matter how a figure is twisted, stretched, or compressed.
Clear and concise comments at the beginning of each section explain the nature and importance of the math needed to solve each puzzle. A carefully explained solution follows each problem. In many cases, all that is needed to solve a puzzle is the ability to think logically and clearly, to be "on the alert for surprising, off-beat angles...that strange hidden factor that everyone else had overlooked."
Fully illustrated, this engaging collection will appeal to parents and children, amateur mathematicians, scientists, and students alike, and may, as the author writes, make the reader "want to study the subject in earnest" and explains "some of the inviting paths that wind away from the problems into lusher areas of the mathematical jungle." 65 black-and-white illustrations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486252117
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	10/01/1986
Series:	Dover Math Games & Puzzles
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	440,699
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	10 - 18 Years

About the Author

Martin Gardner was a renowned author who published over 70 books on subjects from science and math to poetry and religion. He also had a lifelong passion for magic tricks and puzzles. Well known for his mathematical games column in Scientific American and his "Trick of the Month" in Physics Teacher magazine, Gardner attracted a loyal following with his intelligence, wit, and imagination.

Martin Gardner: A Remembrance
The worldwide mathematical community was saddened by the death of Martin Gardner on May 22, 2010. Martin was 95 years old when he died, and had written 70 or 80 books during his long lifetime as an author. Martin's first Dover books were published in 1956 and 1957: Mathematics, Magic and Mystery, one of the first popular books on the intellectual excitement of mathematics to reach a wide audience, and Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, certainly one of the first popular books to cast a devastatingly skeptical eye on the claims of pseudoscience and the many guises in which the modern world has given rise to it. Both of these pioneering books are still in print with Dover today along with more than a dozen other titles of Martin's books. They run the gamut from his elementary Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing, which has been enjoyed by generations of younger readers since the 1980s, to the more demanding The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings, which Dover published in its final revised form in 2005.

To those of us who have been associated with Dover for a long time, however, Martin was more than an author, albeit a remarkably popular and successful one. As a member of the small group of long-time advisors and consultants, which included NYU's Morris Kline in mathematics, Harvard's I. Bernard Cohen in the history of science, and MIT's J. P. Den Hartog in engineering, Martin's advice and editorial suggestions in the formative 1950s helped to define the Dover publishing program and give it the point of view which — despite many changes, new directions, and the consequences of evolution — continues to be operative today.

In the Author's Own Words:
"Politicians, real-estate agents, used-car salesmen, and advertising copy-writers are expected to stretch facts in self-serving directions, but scientists who falsify their results are regarded by their peers as committing an inexcusable crime. Yet the sad fact is that the history of science swarms with cases of outright fakery and instances of scientists who unconsciously distorted their work by seeing it through lenses of passionately held beliefs."

"A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful?" — Martin Gardner

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part I Arithmetic Puzzles
The Colored Socks
Weighty Problem
The Silver Bar
The Three Cats
Mrs. Puffem's Cigarettes
Part II Money Puzzles
Second-Hand Scooter
Low Finance
No Change
Al's Allowance
Pick Your Pay
Part III Speed Puzzles
The Bicycles and the Fly
The Floating Hat
Round Trip
Airplane Paradox
Part IV Plane Geometry Puzzles
Corner to Corner
The Hindu and the Cat
Cutting the Pie
Where Does the Square Go?
Part V Solid Geometry Puzzles
Under the Band
The Third Line
The Painted Cubes
The Spotted Basketball
Part VI Game Puzzles
The Circle of Pennies
Fox and Goose
Bridg-It
Nim
Part VII Probability Puzzles
The Three Pennies
The Tenth Roll
Odds on Kings
Boys vs. Girls
Part VIII Topology Puzzles
The Five Bricks
Outside or Inside?
The Two Knots
Reversing the Sweater
Part IX Miscellaneous Puzzles
The Five Tetrominoes
The Two Tribes
No Time for School
Time for Toast
The Three Neckties
Part X Tricky Puzzles
Suggestions for Further Reading