Notes
Jason Rosenhouse and Raymond Smullyan, Dover Books, 2014.
The history of the logic puzzle goes back at least 150 years to Lewis Carroll. Arguably, it is thousands of years old, and begins, perhaps, with the liar paradox of Epimenides.
Prentice-Hall, 1978.
This sort of logic puzzle appears in Maurice Kraitchik’s Mathematical Recreations (W.W. Norton, 1942). Kraitchik may have originated the form.
The Lady or the Tiger? Alfred A. Knopf, 1982; Forever Undecided, Random House, 1987; The Gödelian Puzzle Book, Dover, 2013.
Formal systems, computability, provability, and recursion.
Martin Gardner described Smullyan’s first puzzle book as “The most original, most profound and most humorous collection of recreational logic and mathematics problems ever written.”
Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.
Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
This is not a valid objection, of course, because Cantor’s proof shows that the altered mapping would still be missing decimals.
Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic, second edition, with Jay Garfield and Tom Tymoczko, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
I invented this puzzle, but it would be a Herculean task to check whether Smullyan invented it earlier!
Anthony Dickins, Q Press, 1969.
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This is a column about the mathematical structures that give us pleasure. Usefulness is irrelevant. Significance, depth, even truth are optional. If something appears in this column, it’s because it’s intriguing, or lovely, or just fun. Moreover, it is so intended.
Jim Henle, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Burton Hall, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063, USA. e-mail: pleasingmath@gmail.com
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Henle, J. The Entertainer. Math Intelligencer 40, 76–80 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-018-9804-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-018-9804-8