A Gardner’s workout: training the mind and entertaining the spirit

Martin Gardner1568811209, 9781568811208

Martin Gardner, as the Master of Mathematical Games and Puzzles, has used his personal exuberance and his fascination with puzzles and magic to entice a wide range of readers into a world of mathematical discovery. As the author of Scientific American’s “Mathematical Games” column for 25 years, he gained a large following among puzzlers, magicians, and mathematicians.
In the years since then, Gardner has continued to write articles for academic journals and popular magazines. Forty-one of those pieces, never before published in book form, are collected in this volume.
Truly a treat for Martin Gardner’s many fans, the articles span a wide range of topics. They include games of chance (and why a “computer” will always beat a human player), word ladders and mathematical word play games, tiling puzzles, magic squares, computer and calculator “magic” tricks, and other mathematical puzzles.
Providing the tools to furnish our all-too-sluggish minds with an athletic workout, Gardner’s problems foster an agility of the mind as they entertain.

---

Table of contents :
Title page ……Page 1
Date-line ……Page 2
Dedication ……Page 3
Table of Contents ……Page 4
Preface ……Page 7
Part I ……Page 9
1 The Opaque Cube ……Page 11
2 The Square Root of 2 – 1,414 213 562 373 095 ……Page 17
3 Flip, the Psychic Robot ……Page 29
4 The Propositional Calculus with Directed Graphs ……Page 33
5 Mathematics and Wordplay ……Page 43
6 Steiner Trees on a Checkerboard ……Page 47
7 Tiling the Bent Tromino ……Page 69
8 Covering a Cube with Congruent Polygons ……Page 81
9 Magic Tricks on a Computer ……Page 85
10 Variations on the 12345679 Trick ……Page 91
11 More Calculator Whimsies ……Page 93
12 Kasparov’s Defeat by Deep Blue ……Page 99
13 Computers Near the Threshold? ……Page 105
14 Cornering the King ……Page 117
15 Toroidal Currency ……Page 125
16 Six Challenging Dissection Tasks ……Page 129
17 Lewis Carroll’s Pillow-Problems ……Page 137
18 Lewis Carroll’s Word Ladders ……Page 141
19 The Ant on 1 x 1 x 2 ……Page 147
20 Three-Point Tiling ……Page 151
21 Lucky Numbers and 2187 ……Page 157
22 3 x 3 Magic Squares ……Page 165
23 Some New Discoveries about 3×3 Magic Squares ……Page 175
24 Primes in Arithmetic Progression ……Page 183
25 Prime Magic Squares ……Page 189
26 The Dominono Game ……Page 195
27 The Growth of Recreational Mathematics ……Page 199
28 Maximum Inscribed Squares, Rectangles, and Triangles ……Page 211
29 Serial Isogons of 90 Degrees ……Page 223
30 Around the Solar System ……Page 239
31 Ten Amazing Mathematical Tricks ……Page 243
32 Modeling Mathematics with Playing Cards ……Page 249
33 The Asymmetric Propeller Theorem ……Page 257
34 Chess Queens and Maximum Unattacked Cells ……Page 265
Part II ……Page 277
35 Lion Hunting ……Page 279
36 Two Books on Infinity ……Page 283
37 The Universe and the Teacup ……Page 289
38 A New Result on Perfect Magic Squares ……Page 293
39 The Number Devil ……Page 299
40 Probability 1 ……Page 303
41 Fuzzy New New Math ……Page 309