My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles

by Martin Gardner

Overview

Over a period of 25 years as author of the Mathematical Games column for Scientific American, Martin Gardner devoted a column every six months or so to short math problems or puzzles. He was especially careful to present new and unfamiliar puzzles that had not been included in such classic collections as those by Sam Loyd and Henry Dudeney. Later, these puzzles were published in book collections, incorporating reader feedback on alternate solutions or interesting generalizations.
The present volume contains a rich selection of 70 of the best of these brain teasers, in some cases including references to new developments related to the puzzle. Now enthusiasts can challenge their solving skills and rattle their egos with such stimulating mind-benders as The Returning Explorer, The Mutilated Chessboard, Scrambled Box Tops, The Fork in the Road, Bronx vs. Brooklyn, Touching Cigarettes, and 64 other problems involving logic and basic math. Solutions are included.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486281520
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	11/01/1994
Series:	Dover Recreational Math
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	199,018
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

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

1. The Returning Explorer
2. Draw Poker
3. The Mutilated Chessboard
4. The Fork in the Road
5. Scrambled Box Tops
6. Cutting the Cube
7. Bronx vs. Brooklyn
8. The Early Commuter
9. The Counterfeit Coins
10. The Touching Cigarettes
11. Two Ferryboats
12. Guess the Diagonal
13. Cross the Network
14. The 12 Matches
15. Hole in the Sphere
16. The Amorous Bugs
17. How Many Children?
18. The Twiddled Bolts
19. The Flight around the World
20. The Repetitious Number
21. The Colliding Missiles
22. The Sliding Pennies
23. Handshakes and Networks
24. The Triangular Duel
25. Crossing the Desert
26. Lord Dunsany's Chess Problem
27. The Lonesome 8
28. Dividing the Cake
29. The Folded Sheet
30. Water and Wine
31. The Absent-Minded Teller
32. Acute Dissection
33. "How Long Is a "Lunar"?"
34. The Game of Googol
35. Marching Cadets and a Trotting Dog
36. "White, Black and Brown"
37. The Plane in the Wind
38. What Price Pets?
39. The Game of Hip
40. A Switching Puzzle
41. Beer Signs on the Highway
42. The Sliced Cube and the Sliced Doughnut
43. Bisecting Yin and Yang
44. The Blue-Eyed Sisters
45. How Old Is the Rose-Red City?
46. Tricky Track
47. Termite and 27 Cubes
48. Collating the Coins
49. Time the Toast
50. A Fixed-Point Theorem
51. How Did Kant Set His Clock?
52. Playing Twenty Questions when Probability Values Are Known
53. Don't Mate in One
54. Find the Hexahedrons
55. Out with the Onion
56. Cut Down the Cuts
57. Dissection Dilemma
58. Interrupted Bridge
59. Dash It All!
60. Move the Queen
61. Read the Hieroglyphics
62. Crazy Cut
63. Find the Oddball
64. Big Cross-Out Swindle
65. Reverse the Dog
66. Funny Fold
Answers