 3rd edition (publ. Nelson, 1929) | |
| Author | Henry Dudeney |
|---|---|
| Subject | Puzzles |
Publication date | 1907 |
| ISBN | 978-0486425580 |
The Canterbury Puzzles and Other Curious Problems is a 1907 mathematical puzzle book by Henry Dudeney. The first part of the book features a series of puzzles based on the characters from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. [1]
Diophantus of Alexandria was an Alexandrian mathematician, who was the author of a series of books called Arithmetica, many of which are now lost. His texts deal with solving algebraic equations. Diophantine equations and Diophantine approximations are important areas of mathematical research. Diophantus coined the term παρισότης (parisotes) to refer to an approximate equality. This term was rendered as adaequalitas in Latin, and became the technique of adequality developed by Pierre de Fermat to find maxima for functions and tangent lines to curves. Diophantus was the first Greek mathematician who recognized fractions as numbers; thus he allowed positive rational numbers for the coefficients and solutions. In modern use, Diophantine equations are usually algebraic equations with integer coefficients, for which integer solutions are sought.
The eight queens puzzle is the problem of placing eight chess queens on an 8×8 chessboard so that no two queens threaten each other; thus, a solution requires that no two queens share the same row, column, or diagonal. There are 92 solutions. The problem was first posed in the mid-19th century. In the modern era, it is often used as an example problem for various computer programming techniques.
Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature – especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was also a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century". He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.
Derived from the Greek word for '5', and "domino", a pentomino is a polyomino of order 5, that is, a polygon in the plane made of 5 equal-sized squares connected edge-to-edge. When rotations and reflections are not considered to be distinct shapes, there are 12 different free pentominoes. When reflections are considered distinct, there are 18 one-sided pentominoes. When rotations are also considered distinct, there are 63 fixed pentominoes.
Recreational mathematics is mathematics carried out for recreation (entertainment) rather than as a strictly research and application-based professional activity or as a part of a student's formal education. Although it is not necessarily limited to being an endeavor for amateurs, many topics in this field require no knowledge of advanced mathematics. Recreational mathematics involves mathematical puzzles and games, often appealing to children and untrained adults, inspiring their further study of the subject.
The classical mathematical puzzle known as the three utilities problem or sometimes water, gas and electricity asks for non-crossing connections to be drawn between three houses and three utility companies in the plane. When posing it in the early 20th century, Henry Dudeney wrote that it was already an old problem. It is an impossible puzzle: it is not possible to connect all nine lines without crossing. Versions of the problem on nonplanar surfaces such as a torus or Möbius strip, or that allow connections to pass through other houses or utilities, can be solved.
A puzzle is a game, problem, or toy that tests a person's ingenuity or knowledge. In a puzzle, the solver is expected to put pieces together in a logical way, in order to arrive at the correct or fun solution of the puzzle. There are different genres of puzzles, such as crossword puzzles, word-search puzzles, number puzzles, relational puzzles, and logic puzzles. The academic study of puzzles is called enigmatology.
The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a historically notable problem in mathematics. Its negative resolution by Leonhard Euler in 1736 laid the foundations of graph theory and prefigured the idea of topology.
Henry Ernest Dudeney was an English author and mathematician who specialised in logic puzzles and mathematical games. He is known as one of the country's foremost creators of mathematical puzzles.
Eliyahu Rips is an Israeli mathematician of Latvian origin known for his research in geometric group theory. He became known to the general public following his co-authoring a paper on what is popularly known as Bible code, the supposed coded messaging in the Hebrew text of the Torah.
Kakuro or Kakkuro or Kakoro is a kind of logic puzzle that is often referred to as a mathematical transliteration of the crossword. Kakuro puzzles are regular features in many math-and-logic puzzle publications across the world. In 1966, Canadian Jacob E. Funk, an employee of Dell Magazines, came up with the original English name Cross Sums and other names such as Cross Addition have also been used, but the Japanese name Kakuro, abbreviation of Japanese kasan kurosu, seems to have gained general acceptance and the puzzles appear to be titled this way now in most publications. The popularity of Kakuro in Japan is immense, second only to Sudoku among Nikoli's famed logic-puzzle offerings.
David Gale was an American mathematician and economist. He was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the departments of mathematics, economics, and industrial engineering and operations research. He has contributed to the fields of mathematical economics, game theory, and convex analysis.
David Breyer Singmaster is an emeritus professor of mathematics at London South Bank University, England. A self-described metagrobologist, he has a huge personal collection of mechanical puzzles and books of brain teasers. He is most famous for being an early adopter and enthusiastic promoter of the Rubik's Cube. His Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube" which he began compiling in 1979 provided the first mathematical analysis of the Cube as well as providing one of the first published solutions. The book contained his cube notation which allowed the recording of Rubik's Cube moves, and which quickly became the standard.
The Ladies' Diary: or, Woman's Almanack appeared annually in London from 1704 to 1841 after which it was succeeded by The Lady's and Gentleman's Diary. It featured material relating to calendars etc. including sunrise and sunset times and phases of the moon, as well as important dates, and a chronology of remarkable events.
In a publishing career spanning 80 years (1930–2010), popular mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner (1914–2010) authored or edited over 100 books and countless articles, columns and reviews.
Paul Joel Nahin is an American electrical engineer and author who has written 20 books on topics in physics and mathematics, including biographies of Oliver Heaviside, George Boole, and Claude Shannon, books on mathematical concepts such as Euler's formula and the imaginary unit, and a number of books on the physics and philosophical puzzles of time travel.
Burkard Polster is a German mathematician who runs and presents the Mathologer channel on YouTube.
The Tower of Hanoi – Myths and Maths is a book in recreational mathematics, on the tower of Hanoi, baguenaudier, and related puzzles. It was written by Andreas M. Hinz, Sandi Klavžar, Uroš Milutinović, and Ciril Petr, and published in 2013 by Birkhäuser, with an expanded second edition in 2018. The Basic Library List Committee of the Mathematical Association of America has suggested its inclusion in undergraduate mathematics libraries.
Problem Solving Through Recreational Mathematics is a textbook in mathematics on problem solving techniques and their application to problems in recreational mathematics, intended as a textbook for general education courses in mathematics for liberal arts education students. It was written by Bonnie Averbach and Orin Chein, published in 1980 by W. H. Freeman and Company, and reprinted in 2000 by Dover Publications.
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