Can You Solve My Problems?: Ingenious, Perplexing, and Totally Satisfying Math and Logic Puzzles

by Alex Bellos

Overview

Puzzle lovers, rejoice!

Bestselling math writer Alex Bellos has a challenge for you: 125 of the world’s best brainteasers from the last two millennia.

Armed with logic alone, you’ll detect counterfeit coins, navigate river crossings, and untangle family trees. Then—with just a dash of high school math—you’ll tie a rope around the Earth, match wits with a cryptic wizard, and use four 4s to create every number from 1 to 50. (It can be done!)

The ultimate casebook for daring puzzlers, Can You Solve My Problems? also tells the story of the puzzle—from ancient China to Victorian England to modern-day Japan. Grab your pencil and get puzzling!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781615193882
Publisher:	The Experiment, LLC
Publication date:	03/21/2017
Series:	Alex Bellos Puzzle Books
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	253,932
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alex Bellos holds a degree in mathematics and philosophy from Oxford University. His bestselling books Here’s Looking at Euclid and The Grapes of Math have been translated into more than 20 languages and were both shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book prize. His puzzle books include Can You Solve My Problems?, Puzzle Ninja, Perilous Problems for Puzzle Lovers, and The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book, and he is also the coauthor of the coloring books Patterns of the Universe and Visions of the Universe. He has launched an elliptical pool table, LOOP. He writes a popular-math blog and a puzzle blog for the Guardian, and he won the Association of British Science Writers award for best science blog in 2016. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Ten tasty teasers: Are you smarter than an 11-year-old? 7

Cabbages, Cheating Husbands, and a Zebra Logic Problems 11

Ten tasty teasers: Are you a wizard at wordplay? 47

A Man Walks Round an Atom… Geometry Problems 51

Ten tasty teasers: Are you smarter than a 12-year-old? 93

Mathematics Most Fowl Practical Problems 97

Ten tasty teasers: Are you a genius at geography? 125

Your Aid I Want, Nine Trees to Plant Problems With Props 127

Ten tasty teasers: Are you smarter than a 13-year-old? 161

The Number Games problems for purists 165

Answers 195

A List of the Puzzles and a Note on Their Sources 323

Acknowledgments 337

About the Author 339

Editorial Reviews

"Think of the best storyteller you know and the coolest teacher you ever had, and now you’ve got some idea of what Alex Bellos is like."

Steven Strogatz

"Bellos has added a classic to the genre of math and logic puzzles. . . . Written with cohesive themes, clever content, and a studied awareness for enriching the reader’s mind, this book is highly recommended to anyone who enjoys the experience of an aha! moment."

the Mathematical Association of America Math Horizons

Bellos has added a classic to the genre of math and logic puzzles. . . . Written with cohesive themes, clever content, and a studied awareness for enriching the reader's mind, this book is highly recommended to anyone who enjoys the experience of an aha! moment.”—Math Horizons, the Mathematical Association of America

“Think of the best storyteller you know and the coolest teacher you ever had, and now you’ve got some idea of what Alex Bellos is like.”
—Steven Strogatz, author of The Joy of x

From the Publisher