The Hinged Square & Other Puzzles


Book Description

A colorful square, dissected into four parts, with hinges marked in black. If you leave the blue piece fixed and swing the others around their hinges, a new shape will emerge. Can you guess just by looking what it will be? This is just one of the tricky geometrical gems that will make a puzzler’s mind work overtime. Try drawing a set of variously shaped polygons using only a compass and a ruler (no measuring allowed!), figuring out which of two sculptures is bigger (logic alone won’t give you the answer), and lots more.




The Shoelace Problem & Other Puzzles


Book Description

Presents a collection of puzzles that demonstrate the principles of mathematics.




Loopy Logic Problems and Other Puzzles


Book Description

Calculate velocity; explain the Maltese cross mechanism that's the basis of the motion picture projector; and work out the ways different pendulums (including Foucault's famous version) swing. Every attractive page in master Ivan Moscovich's eleventh collection of brain-busters offers a tricky puzzle pleasure. Sixteen tiles show either a crowned frog or a crown prince: distribute them randomly on a game board, face down, and then see if you can come up with a configuration that will allow you to flip them so that all frogs or all princes will turn up. Discern the logic of a number pattern in a partially filled-out grid and discover the missing numerals. From gnomic expansions to infinity and limit, these dilemmas demand a smart solver.





Book Description

Presents a collection of puzzles that focus on mathematical concepts.




The Monty Hall Problem & Other Puzzles


Book Description

Puzzlers will feel fit to be tied - Dog Tied: If Fido is tied to a 10-foot-long rope, and his bone is 15 feet away, how is it possible that he can reach and enjoy his bone without breaking or stretching the rope? (And yes - the rope IS tied to something.) There's fun in finding the answer to this and other cool number-based problems. Dust off your mathematics and get solving. The intriguing enigmas include questions on interstellar communications, ancient geometry (Pythagoras and Plato), and even traffic patterns in gridlock city. Or play the grasshopper jumping game. It's all fascinating.




Hinged Dissections


Book Description

These novel and original dissections will be a gold mine for math puzzle enthusiasts and for math educators.




Geometric Dissections


Book Description




Cunning Combination Problems & Other Puzzles


Book Description

There's magic in these brainteasers. Most of them play variations on the magic square, among the oldest puzzles that exist. These cubes or other shapes are made up of groups of cells, each cell containing one of a set of numbers. The set generally corresponds with the number of cells, so, for example, a five-by-five magic square would contain numbers from 1 to 25. The trick: the sum of the numbers in any one row or column (and sometimes diagonal) must be the same. It's pure mathematical beauty. Examine and attempt to figure out the workings of a "diabolic" version created by D�rer, an early variation by Lo-Shu, and variants that use colors, different shapes, and hinged tiles.







Games, Puzzles, and Computation


Book Description

The authors show that there are underlying mathematical reasons for why games and puzzles are challenging (and perhaps why they are so much fun). They also show that games and puzzles can serve as powerful models of computation-quite different from the usual models of automata and circuits-offering a new way of thinking about computation. The appen