Games for Your Mind, Jason Rosenhouse
Games for Your Mind, Jason Rosenhouse
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Games for Your Mind
The History and Future of Logic Puzzles

Author: Jason Rosenhouse

Narrator: Tom Perkins

Unabridged: 13 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/24/2020


Synopsis

Logic puzzles were first introduced to the public by Lewis Carroll in the late nineteenth century and have been popular ever since. Games like Sudoku and Mastermind are fun and engrossing recreational activities, but they also share deep foundations in mathematical logic and are worthy of serious intellectual inquiry.

In this informative and entertaining book, Jason Rosenhouse begins by introducing listeners to logic and logic puzzles and goes on to reveal the rich history of these puzzles. He shows how Carroll's puzzles presented Aristotelian logic as a game for children, yet also informed his scholarly work on logic. He reveals how another pioneer of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan, drew on classic puzzles about liars and truthtellers to illustrate Kurt Gödel's theorems and illuminate profound questions in mathematical logic. Rosenhouse then presents a new vision for the future of logic puzzles based on nonclassical logic, which is used today in computer science and automated reasoning to manipulate large and sometimes contradictory sets of data.

Featuring a wealth of sample puzzles ranging from simple to extremely challenging, this lively and engaging book brings together many of the most ingenious puzzles ever devised, including the "Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever," metapuzzles, paradoxes, and the logic puzzles in detective stories.

About Jason Rosenhouse

Jason Rosenhouse is professor of mathematics at James Madison University. He is the author of The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math's Most Contentious Brain Teaser and Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line. He is coauthor (with Laura Taalman) of Taking Sudoku Seriously: The Math behind the World's Most Popular Pencil Puzzle and coeditor (with Jennifer Beineke) of The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects (Vols. 1-3).


Reviews

After finish this book, I wrote a letter to the author: Hi Dr. Rosenhouse, I am a reader from China. I just finished your book, Games for Your Mind, and I think it's a great book, I enjoyed the whole time when I read it. Thanks for your writing! However, I have some questions about this book, or I will......more

Goodreads review by Mishehu

A fun, engaging, well-written foray into the world of logic games. The author builds from simple to dizzyingly complex problems. All problems (I believe) are imported from other authors (Carol and Smullyan receiving especially lengthy treatments). Along the way, the author also discusses quite a lot......more

Goodreads review by Lars

How Mr. Rosenhouse can make a book about logic this entertaining and riveting is truly remarkable. I learned many things, got a deeper appreciation for logic as a discipline beyond just the Aristotelian syllogism, and, of course, got to engage those little gray ones.......more

Goodreads review by John

A game for the mind is kind of a headache. I found this dense, dull and unapproachable. Also I was listening on audiobook and that format is not conducive to the material bc so much of the material is visual/is incredibly difficult to visualize without the associated charts/visual materials.......more

Goodreads review by Pearlyn

Fun stuff, though the logic puzzles got way beyond me at a certain point. Docking a star because I encountered at least one puzzle/solution with a typo that made it unsolvable.......more