Games for Your Mind

A lively and engaging look at logic puzzles and their role in mathematics, philosophy, and recreationLogic 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. Games for Your Mind explores the history and future of logic puzzles while enabling you to test your skill against a variety of puzzles yourself.In this informative and entertaining book, Jason Rosenhouse begins by introducing readers 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.

"Fascinating. . . . Part philosophy, part maths, part activity book; Games for Your Mind is an ingenious thing."---Amy Barrett, BBC Science Focus, "Excellent."---Elizabeth Palmer, Christian Century, "It’s a serious and at times technical book, specifically about logic puzzles, though beneath its concern with matters such as obversion and epistemic obligations it has an unexpected jauntiness."---Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement, "Jason Rosenhouse’s Games for Your Mind is an engaging popular mathematics book written to enlighten the reader on the mathematics and logic behind popular puzzles. . . .overall, the reviewer would recommend this book to all people who want a puzzling challenge. Although the puzzles towards the end of the book feel impossible, the thrill of that ‘ah!’ moment when you work through Rosenhouse’s solution is surely a high for any mathematician out there."---Holly A. J. Middleton-Spencer, London Mathematical Society

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 the coauthor (with Laura Taalman) of Taking Sudoku Seriously: The Math behind the World's Most Popular Pencil Puzzle and the coeditor (with Jennifer Beineke) of The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects (Vols. 1–3) (Princeton).