"An engaging, accessible introduction into how numbers work and why we shouldn't be afraid of them, from maths expert Rachel Riley. Do you know your fractions from your percentages? Your adjacent to your hypotenuse? And who really knows how to do long division, anyway? Puzzled already? Don't blame you... But fret not! You won't be At Sixes and Sevens for long. In this brilliant, well-rounded guide, Countdown's Rachel Riley will take you back to the very basics, allow you to revisit what you learnt at school (and may have promptly forgotten, *ahem*), build your understanding of maths from the get-go and provide you with the essential toolkit to gain confidence in your numerical abilities. Discover how to divide and conquer, make your decimal debut, become a pythagoras professional and so much more with these easy-to-learn tips and tricks. Packed full of working examples, fool-proof methods, quirky trivia and brainteasers to try from puzzle-pro Dr Gareth Moore, this book is an absolute must-read for anyone and everyone who ever thought maths was 'above' them. Because the truth is: you can do it. What's more, it can be pretty fun too!"--

What does mathematics have to do with poetry? Seemingly, nothing. Mathematics deals with abstractions while poetry with emotions. And yet, the two share something essential: Beauty. Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare, says the title of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Mathematics, Poetry and Beauty tries to solve the secret of the similarity between the two domains. It tries to explain how a mathematical argument and a poem can move us in the same way. Mathematical and poetic techniques are compared, with the aim of showing how they evoke the same sense of beauty. The reader may find that, as Bertrand Russell said, Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty hold and austere, like that of sculpture ... sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

Amusing and informative in its approach to solving mathematical bafflers, this treasury of theories, games, puzzles and oddities of all kinds, compiled by one of the world's best card players (Jacoby) and an expert in mathematical recreations (Benson) will delight and fascinate math enthusiasts. Although primarily intended to entertain, the wide variety of puzzles ? ranging from facile curiosities to very difficult intellectual exercises ? will challenge you to keep your mind going full steam. Each of the book's five sections ? "Fun with Numbers," "Fun with Letters," "The Odds: Explorations in Probability," "Where Inference and Reasoning Reign" and "The Answers Are Whole Numbers" ? is made up of approximately 30 problems, with solutions grouped at the end of each section. Math buffs will love testing their puzzle-solving skills on such challenging brainteasers as The Enterprising Snail, Mrs. Crabbe and the Bacon, The Fly and the Bicycles, The Lovesick Cockroaches, The Three Prisoners, Girls Should Live in Brooklyn, Who Was Executed?, Creaker vs. Roadhog, The Crossed Ladders, The Ancient Order of the Greens, and many more. Few of these problems require any advanced mathematical knowledge or prowess. You'll find that simply keeping your wits about you and your logical skills honed are all you need to enjoy a delightful and thought-provoking adventure in recreational mathematics. Foreword. 10 illustrations. 14 tables.

"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."