Customer Reviews

Are You as Smart as You Think?: 150 Original Mathematical, Logical, and Spatial-Visual Puzzles for All Levels of Puzzle Solvers

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm the author of "Thinkertoys" and "Cracking Creativity" and, generally read as many books as I can that relate to thinking. Terry Stickels, in my opinion, is America's Puzzle Master and has produced another great collection of original puzzles. Over the years, I've become a great fan of Terry and the way he makes me think. This book is superb. If you like puzzles, do yourself a favor and buy this book. It's a hoot!

According to my performance in solving these puzzles, the answer to the question in the title is "pretty close." I was able to get many of them after only a few seconds, although admittedly some did stump me. The collection of 150 puzzles are original to the author, but the forms of most are in accordance with many time-honored formulas. Finding the next number in a sequence, starting with a word and changing a single letter at a time to transform it into another word are well-known methods of creating puzzles. Other classic problems are those involving letters placed in an unusual form in order to suggest a longer message and drawing the minimal number of lines so that all dots in a figure are on a line.
The book is split into two sections, warm-ups and killers, with the latter advertised as being the hardest imaginable. That goal is not achieved. Granted, the killer puzzles are harder, but quite frankly some of them are almost obvious. For example, the message in

DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY
CAST CAST CAST CAST

is not difficult to see. Another example is to find the general formula for the terms of the infinite sequence

3, 11, 19, 27, 35, 43, 51, 59, 67, . . .

Certainly not what I would envision as being examples of killer puzzles. No problem requires more than basic algebra and some require knowledge of different bases of enumeration. For some, simply thinking about them will do the trick.
While I did enjoy reading and working through the puzzles, the level of difficulty appeared to me to be overstated. That is why I gave it four stars rather than five.

My whole family looks forward to Terry Stickel's puzzles and frame games each Sunday in USA Weekend. So when we read that he just published another book -- we picked one up that day. These puzzles are the most original and fun and challenging ever.....thanks, Terry Stickels....keep them coming!

I must admit I expected something special from a couple of rave reviews that I read, but this is really just a compilation of number reasoning tests with some general knowledge and some Dingbats thrown in. The new Martin Gardner? Definitely not, based on this collection, at least. A collection of 150 original puzzles? Depends what you mean by 'original'. I recognised several, for style if not for precise content, and would challenge some of the puzzle answers too.

Average, hence 3 stars.

I like to think I am fairly intelligent, and Mr. Stickels book really made me feel inadequate. I love a challenge and this book is the ultimate. This book should be read by anyone who thinks they are the stuff.

I have never seen anything like it. Blows MENSA away. Way to go Terry, and keep up the good work.

I've been collecting puzzle books for a long time and I've never come across a more original, challenging and fun book yet. There is a little something for eveyone in this wonderful collection. There are also some of the toughest puzzles ever created. Mr. Stickels continues to delight his fans, from his nationally syndicated FRAMEGAMES column in USA WEEKEND, to these first class puzzle books to his excellent day to day calendar . . . he's America's best. I think some of the other reviewers missed the point of what Mr. Stickels writes: straight ahead thinking puzzles with little or no text. That's his style and always has been. One of the reasons I enjoy his challengers so much is he doesn't try to get cute.

Excellent title, but it is not as funny as it sounds. Basically a lot of (quite hard) puzzles. Not for the casual puzzle solver. In addition to this it is geared towards native English speakers.

I like to regularly challenge my thinking and my mind. "Are You as Smart as You Think You Are?" certainly provided that challenge. The puzzles really made me think and I kept coming back to many of them several times, before checking the answer key. Mr. Stickles provides hours of brain stretching entertainment. Keep it up. I'll look forward to your next book.

Stickels and Gardner are among the top popularizers of mathematics and science (see my and other readers' book reviews of Gardner's books, including his early 1980 books). This takes the highest type of Creative Genius, because translating from quantitative to qualitative or verbal language requires mastery of both and of the underlying concepts, and developing puzzles and problems for the public requires inventiveness and creativity beyond translating. Here I want to emphasize that Stickels' and Gardner's methods can lead to enormous improvement in student learning of mathematics and science and even in research in these fields, especially in topics that have not yet been analyzed. For example, my work in Logic-Based Probability (LBP) asks the simple question: what happens if you replace division by subtraction and add 1 in all equations of probability and statistics? The answer is that you get LBP, which is very important for analyzing very rare events and the influences of events. If it gets this simple, we could have a whole nation of inventors trying out different operations and different changes in assumptions. Einstein's general relativity came about largely because some mathematicians asked: what happens if things that look parallel (like tracks running in the same direction) eventually come together? This created Non-Euclidean Geometry.

It is surely an enjoyable book, but I do not feel to agree the originality of all the proposed puzzles, as the editorial review states. To be true, many of mathematical games left me the sound of a deja-vu item, perhaps something reminding me of Sam Loyd's old games. On the other side, I have been surprised by the thinkerobics, that represented also a very good opportunity to train in English language, as I am a foreign reader. But the lack of an underlying structure, and the complete absence of a narrative schema, makes it a mere book of puzzles. I like puzzles, so I like the book, but I am not enthusiastic of it.