"Another scintillating collection of brilliant problems and paradoxes by the most entertaining logician and set theorist who ever lived." — Martin Gardner "Smullyan is not your run-of-the-mill puzzlemeister; he polishes up old chestnuts, spins variations on a theme, and peoples his logical world with a delightful cast of characters." — Science 82 "I believe Ray Smullyan to be the Lewis Carroll of our times. His little books of logic puzzles will be remembered long after most of us are forgotten." — Peter Denning, Chairman of the Computer Science Department, Naval Postgraduate School "You may experience small frissons of delight as you follow Smullyan into the dizzying heights of Gödel's proof and the very nature of proof, truth, and logic in mathematics." — Kirkus Reviews Discover scintillating new perspectives on the principles of mathematical logic with this puzzle treasury. Inspired by the classic tale of a prisoner's choice between two doors, these whimsically themed challenges allow readers to base their decisions on logic rather than luck. Nineteen chapters advance from relatively simple puzzles and meta-puzzles to highly complex paradoxes involving probability, time, and change. The author, a well-known philosopher and magician as well as a celebrated mathematician and logician, was acclaimed by The New York Times as "a master at translating difficult ideas into stories and puzzles that require no formal background, only patience and a passion to learn."

In this entertaining and challenging collection of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan - author of Forever Undecided - continues to delight and astonish us with his gift for making available, in the thoroughly pleasurable form of puzzles, some of the most important mathematical thinking of our time. In the first part of the book, he transports us once again to that wonderful realm where knights, knaves, twin sisters, quadruplet brothers, gods, demons, and mortals either always tell the truth or always lie, and where truth-seekers are set a variety of fascinating problems. The section culminates in an enchanting and profound metapuzzle in which Inspector Craig of Scotland Yard gets involved in a search for the Fountain of Youth on the Island of Knights and Knaves. In the second part of To Mock a Mockingbird, we accompany the Inspector on a summer-long adventure into the field of combinatory logic (a branch of logic that plays an important role in computer science and artificial intelligence). His adventure, which includes enchanted forests, talking birds, bird sociologists, and a classic quest, provides for us along the way the pleasure of solving puzzles of increasing complexity until we reach the Master Forest and - thanks to Godel's famous theorem - the final revelation.

'A wealth of examples to which solutions are given permeate the text so the reader will certainly be active.'The Mathematical GazetteThis is the final book written by the late great puzzle master and logician, Dr. Raymond Smullyan.This book is a sequel to my Beginner's Guide to Mathematical Logic.The previous volume deals with elements of propositional and first-order logic, contains a bit on formal systems and recursion, and concludes with chapters on Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem, along with related results.The present volume begins with a bit more on propositional and first-order logic, followed by what I would call a 'fein' chapter, which simultaneously generalizes some results from recursion theory, first-order arithmetic systems, and what I dub a 'decision machine.' Then come five chapters on formal systems, recursion theory and metamathematical applications in a general setting. The concluding five chapters are on the beautiful subject of combinatory logic, which is not only intriguing in its own right, but has important applications to computer science. Argonne National Laboratory is especially involved in these applications, and I am proud to say that its members have found use for some of my results in combinatory logic.This book does not cover such important subjects as set theory, model theory, proof theory, and modern developments in recursion theory, but the reader, after studying this volume, will be amply prepared for the study of these more advanced topics.