A Lifetime of Puzzles

by Erik D. Demaine (Editor), Tom Rodgers

Martin Gardner has entertained the world with his puzzles for decades and inspired countless mathematicians and scientists. As he rounds out another decade, his colleagues are paying him tribute with this special collection that contains contributions from some of the most respected puzzlemasters, magicians and mathematicians, including: - John H. Conway - William R. Gosper - Ed Pegg, Jr. - Roger Penrose - Raymond Smullyan - Peter Winkler And of course there is something from the orignal puzzlemaster himself, Martin Gardner.

Genres: Mathematics

360 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Erik D. Demaine is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former child prodigy. Demaine's research interests range throughout algorithms, from data structures for improving web searches to the geometry of understanding how proteins fold to the computational difficulty of playing games. He received a MacArthur Fellowship as a “computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending—moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter”. He appears in the recent origami documentary Between the Folds, cowrote a book about the theory of folding (Geometric Folding Algorithms), and a book about the computational complexity of games (Games, Puzzles, and Computation). Together with his father Martin, his interests span the connections between mathematics and art, including curved-crease sculptures in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Renwick Gallery in the Smithsonian.

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first section of this book is rightfully devoted to magic, an area that Martin Gardner had an enormous influence over. The very term "mathemagical" can be used to describe much of what he did, as a large number of magic tricks have a basis in mathematical operations.
Some of the greatest puzzles in history are the topic of the second section, it opens with the tangram, which launched the first ever puzzle craze and is still keeping many people busy. "De Viribus Quantatis" by Luca Pacioli is considered the first recreational mathematics book ever printed and is the second topic of the second section. One clear point is how old some problems/puzzles are. The much repeated and modified River Crossing problem appears in "De Viribus Quantatis" which was published in 1500 CE. Sections 3 and 4 contain descriptions of puzzles and games and there is of course a section on magic squares. The final paper demonstrates a way that arithmetic and numbers can be represented by rectangles.
Martin Gardner lived past his ninetieth birthday and he was mentally sound right up to the end. We were all blessed to have had him on earth for so long; his legacy to mathematics and magic has great depth and breadth. This book demonstrates some of that legacy, but only volumes can do it justice.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission and this review appears on Amazon