In his new book, Raymond Smullyan, grand vizier of the logic puzzle, joins Scheherazade, a charming young woman of “fantastic logical ingenuity,” to give us 1001 hours of brain-teasing fun. Scheherazade, we find, has gotten back into hot water with the king, and is once more in danger of losing her head at down. But, thinking quickly, she tempts the king to stay her execution by posing him the most delightfully devious mathematical and logic puzzle ever invented. They keep him guessing for many more nights until the fatal hour has passed, and she keeps her head. The Riddle of Scheherazade includes several wonderful old chestnuts and many fiendishly original puzzles, 225 in all. There are logic tricks and number games, metapuzzles (puzzles about puzzles), liar/truth-teller exercises, Gödelian brian twisters, baffling paradoxes, and an excursion, under Scheherazade’s expert guidance, into an amusing new field invented by Smullyan, called “coercive” logic, in which the answer to a problem can actually change the fate of the puzzler! An absolute must for all puzzle fans—from the middle-school whiz to the sophisticated mathematician or computer scientist.

With a great wittiness, the author re-creates Scherezade, the young protagonist of "The thousand nights and a night, who will delay her execution now devising deliciously tortuous logical and mathematical puzzles and wonderful old riddles that will let us put to use our mental skills.

More than two hundred new and challenging logic puzzles—the simplest brainteaser to the most complex paradoxes in contemporary mathematical thinking—from our topmost puzzlemaster (“the most entertaining logician who ever lived,” Martin Gardner has called him). Our guide to the puzzles is the Sorcerer, who resides on the Island of Knights and Knaves, where knights always tell the truth and knaves always lie, and he introduces us to the amazing magic—logic—that enables to discover which inhabitants are which. Then, in a picaresque adventure in logic, he takes us to the planet Og, to the Island of Partial Silence, and to a land where metallic robots wearing strings of capital letters are noisily duplicating and dismantling themselves and others. The reader’s job is to figure out how it all works. Finally, we accompany the Sorcerer on an alluring tour of Infinity which includes George Cantor’s amazing mathematical insights. The tour (and the book) ends with Satan devising a diabolical puzzle for one of Cantor’s prize students—who outwits him! In sum: a devilish magician’s cornucopia of puzzles—a delight for every age and level of ability.

From Simon & Schuster, This Book Needs No Title is Raymond Smullyan's budget of living paradoxes—the author of What is the Name of This Book? Including eighty paradoxes, logical labyrinths, and intriguing enigmas progress from light fables and fancies to challenging Zen exercises and a novella and probe the timeless questions of philosophy and life.

"Another scintillating collection of brilliant problems and paradoxes by the most entertaining logician and set theorist who ever lived." — Martin Gardner. Inspired by the classic tale of a prisoner's dilemma, these whimsically themed challenges involve paradoxes about probability, time, and change; metapuzzles; and self-referentiality. Nineteen chapters advance in difficulty from relatively simple to highly complex.

This fanciful, original collection for readers of all ages features arithmetic puzzles, logic problems related to crime detection, and logic and arithmetic puzzles involving King Arthur and his Dogs of the Round Table.

A celebrated mathematician presents more than 200 increasingly complex problems that delve into Gödel's undecidability theorem and other examples of the deepest paradoxes of logic and set theory. Solutions.

"Humans are the only animals who create and solve puzzles--for the sheer pleasure of it--and there is no obvious genetic reason why we would do this. Marcel Danesi explores the psychology of puzzles and puzzling, with scores of classic examples. His pioneering book is both entertaining and enlightening." --Will Shortz, Crossword Editor, The New York Times "... Puzzle fanatics will enjoy the many riddles, illusions, cryptograms and other mind-benders offered for analysis." --Psychology Today "... a bristlingly clear... always intriguing survey of the history and rationale of puzzles.... A] splendid study...." --Knight Ridder Newspapers

A lyrical celebration of storytelling, of childhood, and of the transformative power of music. Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach’s Goldberg Variations , Luis Sagasti’s second book to appear in English takes the guise of a musical scheherazade, recounting story after story, vibrating to celestial harmonies. From the music born of the sun to the music sent into space on the Voyager mission, from Rothko to rock music, from the composers of the concentration camps to a weeping room for Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands, A Musical Offering traverses the shifting sands of fiction and history.