Have you ever wondered what it takes to make a good
game, a challenging puzzle, or the impossible to answer?
If so, then this is a book for you.
Suppose you have a cloth bag with one marble
inside -- either black or white, you don't know
which. You add a white marble, shake the bag,
and take a marble at random. It's white. What
are the odds that the remaining marble is white?
Obviously 1/2, right? Wrong. The correct
answer is 2/3.
This is just one of the scores of intriguing puzzles
and paradoxes in this fascinating book. Lewis
Carroll's diverse interests ranged from inventing new games like
"arithmetical croquet"to important problems in symbolic logic and
propositional calculus. He was famous for his puns, anagrams, acrostics,
and riddles and is believed to be the author of a poem that reads the same
vertically as horizontally. Some of his word puzzles remain unsolved to
this
day. His mathematical humor included instructions for folding a
handkerchief into a variant of the Klein bottle, as well as "proof" that
if a
bag contains two marbles that must be either black or white, there will
always be one black and one white.
Just as Carroll was the preeminant recreational mathematician of his time
(perhaps of all time), Martin Gardner is the preeminant writer on
recreational mathematics of our time. He is the ideal guide for this fun
and
informative tour of Carroll's inventions.
Martin Gardner
Martin Gardner's previous books on Lewis Carroll and his works
include The Annotated Alice and More Annotated Alice. Mr.
Gardner is also the author of many books on magic and recreational
mathematics, and for many years wrote the "Mathematical
Recreations" column for Scientific American.
