Eighty paradoxes, logical lobyrinths, 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[...]
This is an exciting if not rambling account of events of Raymond Smullyan's four lives - as a mathematical logician, musician, magician, and author - together with thoughts that come to his mind as he recalls them. This book includes topics from some of Smullyan's twenty-six books, as well as many o[...]
The author presents a bombshell puzzle so startling that it seems incredible that there could be any solution at all! But there is indeed a solution - moreover, one that requires a chain of lesser puzzles to be solved first. The reader is thus taken on a journey through a maze of subsidiary problems[...]
A beguiling, whimsical guide to the meaning and value of Chinese philosophy to Westerners, from gardening to taking a nap.[...]
This is a puzzle book covering logic, philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, computer science and mathematics. It contains many puzzles and their solutions and aims to attract many readers in an age where computer science, logic, and mathematics are becoming increasingly important.[...]
Kurt Godel, the greatest logician of our time, startled the world of mathematics in 1931 with his Theorem of Undecidability, which showed that some statements in mathematics are inherently "undecidable". His work on the completeness of logic, the incompleteness of number theory, and the consistency [...]
"Is there really a God, and if so, what is God actually like? Is there an afterlife, and if so, is there such a thing as eternal punishment for unrepentant sinners, as many orthodox Christians and Muslims believe? And is it really true that our unconscious minds are connected to a higher spiritual r[...]
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[...]
Here are 50 elegant, witty chess problems concerned with deducing events in a game's past. In the first half, Holmes instructs Watson in the intricacies of retrograde analysis while the two examine interrupted games. The second half features increasingly difficult self-contained chess mysteries, inc[...]
Combining stories of great philosophers, quotations, and riddles with the fundamentals of mathematical logic, this new textbook for first courses in mathematical logic was written by the subject's creative master. Raymond Smullyan offers clear, incremental presentations of difficult logic concepts w[...]
This book features a unique approach to the teaching of mathematical logic by putting it in the context of the puzzles and paradoxes of common language and rational thought. It serves as a bridge from the author's puzzle books to his technical writing in the fascinating field of mathematical logic. [...]