’Be warned: cracking puzzles releases a very addictive drug.’ – Marcus du Sautoy Have you ever wanted to be a puzzle pro or logical luminary? Well, look no further!

The noted expert selects 70 of his favorite "short" puzzles, including such mind-bogglers as The Returning Explorer, The Mutilated Chessboard, Scrambled Box Tops, and dozens more involving logic and basic math. Solutions included.

A collection of math and logic puzzles features number games, magic squares, tricks, problems with dominoes and dice, and cross sums, in addition to other intellectual teasers.

Provides information on numbers and what makes particular ones noteworthy

This lively, stimulating account of non-Euclidean geometry by a noted mathematician covers matrices, determinants, group theory, and many other related topics, with an emphasis on the subject's novel, striking aspects. 1955 edition.

Stimulating, thought-provoking analysis of the most interesting intellectual inconsistencies in mathematics, physics, and language, including being led astray by algebra (De Morgan's paradox). 1982 edition.

Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought. The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction-Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative. The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.

Research in mathematics is much more than solving puzzles, but most people will agree that solving puzzles is not just fun: it helps focus the mind and increases one's armory of techniques for doing mathematics. Mathematical Puzzles makes this connection explicit by isolating important mathematical methods, then using them to solve puzzles and prove a theorem. Features A collection of the world’s best mathematical puzzles Each chapter features a technique for solving mathematical puzzles, examples, and finally a genuine theorem of mathematics that features that technique in its proof Puzzles that are entertaining, mystifying, paradoxical, and satisfying; they are not just exercises or contest problems.

Here are over 300 tantalizing puzzles, brain teasers and riddles by one of the greatest mathematical geniuses of the twentieth century, Shakuntala Devi, popularly known as the 'human computer'. The puzzles include every possible type of mathematical recreation, time and distance problems, age and money riddles, puzzles involving geometry and elementary algebra, and just plain straight thinking. Often entertaining, but always stimulating, the puzzles included in the book offer hours of fun and relaxation.

At once a pioneering study of evolution and an accessible and lively reading experience, a book that offers the most convincing—and radical—explanation for how and why the human mind evolved. Consciousness, morality, creativity, language, and art: these are the traits that make us human. Scientists have traditionally explained these qualities as merely a side effect of surplus brain size, but Miller argues that they were sexual attractors, not side effects. He bases his argument on Darwin’ s theory of sexual selection, which until now has played second fiddle to Darwin’ s theory of natural selection, and draws on ideas and research from a wide range of fields, including psychology, economics, history, and pop culture. Witty, powerfully argued, and continually thought-provoking, The Mating Mind is a landmark in our understanding of our own species.