Topical Guide 342
Mark Dorset
Thinking: Logic
Games: Puzzles: Logic Puzzles
Dudley was an amateur student of logic, and he loved springing “puzzlers” and “posers” on Herb and Lorna. …
Dudley was delighted to find someone with a talent for logic, and he began developing it at once. Lorna took to the logical puzzles and problems that Dudley supplied her as quickly as she had taken to modeling in papier-mâché or carving ivory. She discovered that she enjoyed doing something that required as much from her intellect as the little ivory figures required from her imagination and her fingers.Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 13
“I now introduce you to Professor Smullyan, who will prove to you that either he doesn’t exist or you don’t exist, but you don’t know which.”
Martin Fitting, introducing Raymond Smullyan to an undergraduate mathematics club (quoted by Martin Gardner at the start of his review of What Is the Name of This Book?)
“The most original, most profound, and most humorous collection of recreational logic and math problems ever written.”
“The value of the book lies in the wealth of ingenious puzzles. They afford amusement, vigorous exercise, and instruction.”
Willard Van Orman Quine, The New York Times Book Review, May 28, 1978
If you’re intrigued by puzzles and paradoxes, these 200 mind-bending logic puzzles, riddles, and diversions will thrill you with challenges to your powers of reason and common sense. Raymond M. Smullyan — a celebrated mathematician, logician, magician, and author — presents a logical labyrinth of more than 200 increasingly complex problems. The puzzles delve into Gödel’s undecidability theorem and other examples of the deepest paradoxes of logic and set theory. Detailed solutions follow each puzzle.
See also: Thinking: Focusing the Attention TG 132
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