To Mock a Mockingbird

Author: Raymond M. Smullyan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0192801422
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
The author of Forever Undecided, Raymond Smullyan continues to delight and astonish us with his gift for making available, in the thoroughly pleasurable form of puzzles, some of the most important mathematical thinking of our time.

Satan, Cantor, And Infinity And Other Mind-bogglin

Author: Raymond M. Smullyan
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307819825
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
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.

This Book Needs No Title

Author: Raymond Smullyan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0671628313
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
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.

Forever Undecided

Author: Raymond M. Smullyan
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307962466
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
Forever Undecided is the most challenging yet of Raymond Smullyan’s puzzle collections. It is, at the same time, an introduction—ingenious, instructive, entertaining—to Gödel’s famous theorems. With all the wit and charm that have delighted readers of his previous books, Smullyan transports us once again to that magical island where knights always tell the truth and knaves always lie. Here we meet a new and amazing array of characters, visitors to the island, seeking to determine the natives’ identities. Among them: the census-taker McGregor; a philosophical-logician in search of his flighty bird-wife, Oona; and a regiment of Reasoners (timid ones, normal ones, conceited, modest, and peculiar ones) armed with the rules of propositional logic (if X is true, then so is Y). By following the Reasoners through brain-tingling exercises and adventures—including journeys into the “other possible worlds” of Kripke semantics—even the most illogical of us come to understand Gödel’s two great theorems on incompleteness and undecidability, some of their philosophical and mathematical implications, and why we, like Gödel himself, must remain Forever Undecided!

The Lady Or the Tiger?

Author: Raymond M. Smullyan
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 048647027X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
"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.

Alice in Puzzle-land

Author: Raymond M. Smullyan
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486482006
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
Characters from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass populate these 88 intriguing puzzles. Mathematician Raymond Smullyan re-creates the spirit of Lewis Carroll's writings in puzzles involving word play, logic and metalogic, and philosophical paradoxes. Challenges range from easy to difficult and include solutions, plus 60 charming illustrations. "An ingenious book." — Boston Globe.

The Riddle of Scheherazade, and Other Amazing Puzzles, Ancient & Modern

Author: Raymond M. Smullyan
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 9780679446347
Category : Logic puzzles
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In his new book, Raymond Smullyan, grand vizier of the logic puzzlejoins Scheherazade, a charming young woman of "fantastic logical ingenuity", to give us 1001 hours of brain-teasing fun.

The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes

Author: Raymond M. Smullyan
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486482014
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
Join Holmes and Watson as they examine interrupted games to deduce prior moves. A series of increasingly complex chess mysteries culminates in a double murder perpetrated by Professor Moriarty. The master sleuth instructs his companion (and us) in the intricacies of retrograde analysis; readers need only a knowledge of how the pieces move.

Lambda-Calculus and Combinators

Author: J. Roger Hindley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521898850
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
Combinatory logic and lambda-calculus, originally devised in the 1920's, have since developed into linguistic tools, especially useful in programming languages. The authors' previous book served as the main reference for introductory courses on lambda-calculus for over 20 years: this long-awaited new version is thoroughly revised and offers a fully up-to-date account of the subject, with the same authoritative exposition. The grammar and basic properties of both combinatory logic and lambda-calculus are discussed, followed by an introduction to type-theory. Typed and untyped versions of the systems, and their differences, are covered. Lambda-calculus models, which lie behind much of the semantics of programming languages, are also explained in depth. The treatment is as non-technical as possible, with the main ideas emphasized and illustrated by examples. Many exercises are included, from routine to advanced, with solutions to most at the end of the book.

What is the Name of this Book?

Author: Raymond M. Smullyan
Publisher: Dover Math Games & Puzzles
ISBN: 9780486481982
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
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.