My best mathematical and logic puzzles

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1. jfaucettMar 2018
   Here's some books I would like to see on a coffee table.

   1. An illustrated book of bad arguments

   2. Maus by Art Spiegelman

   3. Amano: The Complete Prints of Yoshitaka Amano

   4. Chinese Calligraphy: 50 Characters to Inspire Peace and Calm

   5. My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles by Gardner

   6. The Illustrated Story of Art: The Great Art Movements and the Paintings that Inspired them

   7. The Design of Everyday Things

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2. todd8Feb 2014
   Growing up, before the internet, I fell in love with libraries. I discovered Scientific American and it's regular column "Mathematical Games" by Martin Gardner. I eventually read every one of those columns written by Gardner and picked up a lot of science from the rest of the magazine along the way. When I discovered his 1950's column on hexaflexagons I introduced them at my junior high school where dozens of us carried them around and played with them at lunchtime. Several other diversions I learned from Martin Gardner also made the rounds at that school.

   I highly recommend the Mathematical Games columns written by Gardner; many of the more interesting ones are available in his books as collections, for example [1], which is less than $5 on Amazon. (Equally fascinating to me then was the Scientific American column "Amateur Scientist", this went back decades farther than "Mathematical Games" and showed projects, actually built by readers, that were often completely over the top--atom smashers, x-ray machines, sophisticated seismographs, etc. Thank goodness I didn't kill myself in my homemade lab in the basement.)

   For an up to date treatment of the flexigon see [2].

   [1] My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles, Martin Gardner, Dover, 1994. [2] Flexagons Inside Out, Les Pook, Cambridge Univ Press, 2003.

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