Customer Reviews

A Lifetime of Puzzles: A Collection of Puzzles in Honor of Martin Gardner's 90th Birthday

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My entire family likes puzzles of all sorts, and I bought this as a gift for one of my sons, a physicist and engineer, who also collects and designs wooden puzzles. (The book was published in honor of Martin Gardner's 90th birthday!)

The puzzles are a collection contributed by mathematicians, magicians, and others. They range from math to tricks to mazes to wooden puzzles, all kinds of things. History of puzzles throughout the ages is shown. Explanations accompany the puzzles.

The reader should be well versed in mathematics to get the most out of the book.

It's a really nice book for anyone who likes convoluted puzzles, and the text is well written. There is a list of the contributors in the back, with a short paragraph about each one. This is interesting, too.

I really like it, (I looked through it, of course, before I wrapped it up!), and it will keep you very well entertained.

The first section of this book is rightfully devoted to magic, an area that Martin Gardner had an enormous influence over. The very term "mathemagical" can be used to describe much of what he did, as a large number of magic tricks have a basis in mathematical operations.
Some of the greatest puzzles in history are the topic of the second section, it opens with the tangram, which launched the first ever puzzle craze and is still keeping many people busy. "De Viribus Quantatis" by Luca Pacioli is considered the first recreational mathematics book ever printed and is the second topic of the second section. One clear point is how old some problems/puzzles are. The much repeated and modified River Crossing problem appears in "De Viribus Quantatis" which was published in 1500 CE. Sections 3 and 4 contain descriptions of puzzles and games and there is of course a section on magic squares. The final paper demonstrates a way that arithmetic and numbers can be represented by rectangles.
Martin Gardner lived past his ninetieth birthday and he was mentally sound right up to the end. We were all blessed to have had him on earth for so long; his legacy to mathematics and magic has great depth and breadth. This book demonstrates some of that legacy, but only volumes can do it justice.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission