Martin Gardner

Packing spheres, Reversi, braids, polyominoes, board games, and the puzzles of Lewis Carroll. These and other mathematical diversions return to readers with updates to all the chapters, including new game variations, mathematical proofs, and other developments and discoveries. Read about Knuth's Word Ladders program and the latest developments in the digits of pi. Once again these timeless puzzles will charm readers while demonstrating principles of logic, probability, geometry, and other fields of mathematics.

Packing spheres, Reversi, braids, polyominoes, board games, and the puzzles of Lewis Carroll. These and other mathematical diversions return to readers with updates to all the chapters, including new game variations, mathematical proofs, and other developments and discoveries. Read about Knuth's Word Ladders program and the latest developments in the digits of pi. Once again these timeless puzzles will charm readers while demonstrating principles of logic, probability, geometry, and other fields of mathematics.

Paradoxes and paper-folding, Moebius variations and mnemonics, fallacies, magic squares, topological curiosities, parlor tricks, and games ancient and modern, from Polyominoes, Nim, Hex, and the Tower of Hanoi to four-dimensional ticktacktoe. These mathematical recreations, clearly and cleverly presented by Martin Gardner, delight and perplex while demonstrating principles of logic, probability, geometry, and other fields of mathematics. Hexaflexagons, Probability Paradoxes, and the Tower of Hanoi is the inaugural volume in Martin Gardner's New Mathematical Library. This book of the earliest of Gardner's enormously popular Scientific American columns and puzzles continues to challenge and fascinate readers. Now the author, in consultation with experts, has added updates to all the chapters, including new game variations, mathematical proofs, and other developments and discoveries.

Martin Gardner continues to delight. He introduces readers to the Generalized Ham Sandwich Theorem, origami, digital roots, magic squares, the mathematics of cooling coffee, the induction game of Eleusis, Dudeney puzzles, the maze at Hampton Court Palace, and many more mathematical puzzles and principles. Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma Cube is the second volume in Martin Gardner's New Mathematical Library, based on his enormously popular Scientific American columns. Now the author, in consultation with experts, has added updates to all the chapters, including new game variations, mathematical proofs, and other developments and discoveries, to challenge and fascinate a new generation of readers.

Paradoxes and paper-folding, Moebius variations and mnemonics, fallacies, magic squares, topological curiosities, parlor tricks, and games ancient and modern, from Polyominoes, Nim, Hex, and the Tower of Hanoi to four-dimensional ticktacktoe. These mathematical recreations, clearly and cleverly presented by Martin Gardner, delight and perplex while demonstrating principles of logic, probability, geometry, and other fields of mathematics. Hexaflexagons, Probability Paradoxes, and the Tower of Hanoi is the inaugural volume in Martin Gardner's New Mathematical Library. This book of the earliest of Gardner's enormously popular Scientific American columns and puzzles continues to challenge and fascinate readers. Now the author, in consultation with experts, has added updates to all the chapters, including new game variations, mathematical proofs, and other developments and discoveries.

Martin Gardner continues to delight. He introduces readers to the Generalized Ham Sandwich Theorem, origami, digital roots, magic squares, the mathematics of cooling coffee, the induction game of Eleusis, Dudeney puzzles, the maze at Hampton Court Palace, and many more mathematical puzzles and principles. Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma Cube is the second volume in Martin Gardner's New Mathematical Library, based on his enormously popular Scientific American columns. Now the author, in consultation with experts, has added updates to all the chapters, including new game variations, mathematical proofs, and other developments and discoveries, to challenge and fascinate a new generation of readers.

For over fifty years Martin Gardner has been delighting readers with elegant, witty, and highly intelligent writing on an amazing array of topics. Best known for his works on popular science and mathematics, and as an incisive skeptical commentator on the paranormal, Gardner is also an accomplished writer of children's literature, a novelist, and a prolific essayist on religion, philosophy, and other issues. This new collection of Gardner gems takes its name from an essay on a mathematical theme, about a jinn (or genie) trapped in a "Klein Bottle"—an amusing tale that also teaches the math phobic something interesting about a theoretical one-sided object with no distinction between inside and outside. Other topics in math and physics include speculations about universes where time runs in reverse; the Banach-Tarski paradox (whereby a sphere, after being deconstructed, can be reassembled at twice its size); and a vigorous defense of the objective reality of mathematical theorems independent of human culture. On the literary side, Gardner discusses two neglected works by G. K. Chesterton, one of which concerns an imaginary but now very topical war between Islam and Christianity. He also considers the fantasies of L. Frank Baum that don't take place in Oz, Clement Moore's ever-popular The Night Before Christmas, and the many fascinating books by Lewis Carroll that are sometimes overshadowed by his famous Alice in Wonderland. A treat for longtime Gardner readers or the perfect introduction for newcomers, The Jinn from Hyperspace offers a rich selection of stimulating intellectual wonders.

First published in 1789, Jeremy Bentham's best-known work remains a classic of modern philosophy and jurisprudence. Its definitions of the foundations of utilitarian philosophy and its groundbreaking studies of crime and punishment retain their relevance to modern issues of moral and political philosophy, economics, and legal theory. Based on the assumption that individuals seek pleasure and avoid pain, Bentham's utilitarian perspective forms a guide to moral decision-making. With the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" as his objective, the author attempts to identify the sources and varieties of pleasure and pain as well as the ways in which they can be measured in assessing moral options. Considerations of intentionality, consciousness, motives, and dispositions support Bentham's arguments. The text concludes with his survey of purpose and the role of law and jurisprudence, a fascinating exercise in the theory of social reform that explores conflicts between the interests of the majority and individual freedom.

Of all of Martin Gardner's writings, none gained him a wider audience or was more central to his reputation than his Mathematical Recreations column in "Scientific American", which virtually defined the genre of popular mathematics writing for a generation. Flatland, Hydras and Eggs: Mathematical Mystifications will be the final collection of these columns, covering a period roughly from 1979 to Gardner's retirement as a regular columnist in 1986. The notable trend over Gardner's career is the increasing sophistication of the mathematics he has been able to translate into his famously lucid prose. These columns show him at the top of his form and are not to be missed by anyone with an interest in mathematics. As always in his published collections, Gardner includes letters received from mathematicians and other commenting on the ideas presented in the columns.

This beautifully designed model account includes important new information which will not only be of great interest to botanists, conservationist and horticulturists but also to local people who are dependent on the diminishing natural habitats in central and southern Chile.

A single-volume collection of popular short puzzles culled from the math expert's Scientific American columns is grouped by subject and difficulty level and features nine new puzzles. By the author of The Colossal Book of Mathematics. 10,000 first printing.

This book contains scores of intriguing puzzles and paradoxes from Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, whose interests ranged from inventing new games like Arithmetical Croquet to important problems in symbolic logic and propositional calculus. Written by Carroll expert and well-known mathematics author Martin Gardner, this tour through Carroll's inventions is both fun and informative.

Martin Gardner—"one of the most brilliant men and gracious writers I have ever known," wrote Stephen Jay Gould—is the wittiest, most devastating debunker of scientific fraud and chicanery of our time. In this new book Gardner explores startling scientific concepts, such as the possibility of multiple universes and the theory that time can go backwards. Armed with his expert, skeptical eye, he examines the bizarre tangents produced by Freudians and deconstructionists in their critiques of "Little Red Riding Hood," and reveals the fallacies of pseudoscientific cures, from Dr. Bruno Bettelheim's erroneous theory of autism to the cruel farces of Facilitated Communication and Primal Scream Therapy. Ever prolific, and still engaging at the spry age of eighty-eight, Gardner has become an American institution unto himself, a writer to be celebrated.

"I have always been intrigued by fringe science," writes Martin Gardner in the preface to this book, "perhaps for the same reason that I enjoy freak shows and circuses. Pseudoscientists, especially the extreme cranks, are fascinating creatures for psychological study. Moreover, I have found that one of the best ways to learn something about any branch of science is to find out where its crackpots go wrong." A unique combination of horse sense and drollery has made Martin Gardner the undisputed dean of the critics of pseudoscience. This bountiful collection of essays and articles will be wholeheartedly greeted by Gardner's fans, as well as by new readers. This collection of articles - many of which first appeared in the Skeptical Inquirer, the New York Review of Books, and Free Inquiry - explores pseudoscience and strange religious beliefs with the author's trademark wit and verve. Destined to be a classic of skeptical literature, this book covers a wide range of topics - including UFOs, rainmaking, ghosts, the Big Bang, ESP, Oral Roberts, as well as the early history of spiritualism and today's bizarre "trance channeling" cults.

The author presents a selection of pieces from his Scientific American "Mathematical Games" column, presenting puzzles and concepts that range from arithmetic and geometrical games to the meaning of M. C. Escher's artwork.

Since the publication of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, the discovery of such astronomical phenomena as quasars, pulsars, and black holes -- all intimately connected to relativity -- has provoked a tremendous upsurge of interest in the subject. This volume, a revised version of Martin Gardner's earlier Relativity for the Million, brings this fascinating topic up to date. Witty, perceptive, and easily accessible to the general reader, it is one of the clearest and most entertaining introductions to relativity ever written. Mr. Gardner offers lucid explanations of not only the special and general theories of relativity, but of the Michelson-Morley experiment, gravity and spacetime, Mach's principle, the twin paradox, models of the universe, and other topics. A new Postscript, examining the latest developments in the field, and specially written for this edition, is also included. The clarity of the text is especially enhanced by the brilliant graphics of Anthony Ravielli, making this "by far the best layman's account of this difficult subject." -- Christian Science Monitor.

Ninety-three riddles, mazes, illusions, tricky questions, word and picture puzzles, and other challenges offer hours of entertainment for youngsters. Filled with rib-tickling drawings. Solutions.

"A fascinating, challenging book." — A. L. A. Booklist. Experiment with cryptography — the science of secret writing. Cipher and decipher codes: transposition and polyalphabetical ciphers, famous codes, typewriter and telephone codes, codes that use playing cards, knots, and swizzle sticks...even invisible writing and sending messages through outer space. Hours of intrigue and challenge. 45 diagrams.

Famed puzzle expert explains math behind a multitude of mystifying tricks: card tricks, stage "mind reading," coin and match tricks, counting out games, geometric dissections, etc. Probability, sets, theory of numbers clearly explained. Also, more than 400 tricks, guaranteed to work, that you can do. 135 illustrations.