Skip to main content
Log in

The Entertainer

  • For Our Mathematical Pleasure
  • Jim Henle, Editor
  • Published:
The Mathematical Intelligencer Aims and scope Submit manuscript

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. Jason Rosenhouse and Raymond Smullyan, Dover Books, 2014.

  2. 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.

  3. Prentice-Hall, 1978.

  4. This sort of logic puzzle appears in Maurice Kraitchik’s Mathematical Recreations (W.W. Norton, 1942). Kraitchik may have originated the form.

  5. The Lady or the Tiger? Alfred A. Knopf, 1982; Forever Undecided, Random House, 1987; The Gödelian Puzzle Book, Dover, 2013.

  6. Formal systems, computability, provability, and recursion.

  7. 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.”

  8. Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.

  9. Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

  10. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

  11. This is not a valid objection, of course, because Cantor’s proof shows that the altered mapping would still be missing decimals.

  12. Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic, second edition, with Jay Garfield and Tom Tymoczko, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

  13. I invented this puzzle, but it would be a Herculean task to check whether Smullyan invented it earlier!

  14. Anthony Dickins, Q Press, 1969.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jim Henle.

Additional information

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

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Henle, J. The Entertainer. Math Intelligencer 40, 76–80 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-018-9804-8

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-018-9804-8

Navigation