

Martin Gardner, puzzle master extraordinaire - Bzomak
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29688355

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jlees
Lovely article with some interesting puzzles near the bottom (and top). When I
was young, Martin Gardner's puzzle books, along with Raymond Smullyan's 'What
Is The Name Of This Book?'[1], introduced me to logic and to the fact that
mathematics could be _fun_ \- something that was very influential in going on
to study maths and computer science. I thoroughly recommend checking them out
if you haven't already.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/What-Name-This-Book-
Recreational/dp/04...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Name-This-Book-
Recreational/dp/0486481980)

~~~
zem
for me it was gardner, and yakov perelman's "mathematics can be fun". i still
mourn that the latter went out of print and has all but vanished.

~~~
vanderZwan
Archive.org to the rescue!

[https://archive.org/details/MathematicsCanBeFun-1](https://archive.org/details/MathematicsCanBeFun-1)

(Offtopic: honestly, I love that website and the work they do. My personal
favourite find there is a full copy of "On The Spiritual In Art" by Kandinsky.
Reading his thoughts behind his artworks is so much more valuable in bringing
his artworks to life than listening to rambling art critics.)

~~~
gphilip
Rough translation of the Preface on page 4 by the person who scanned the book.
The preface is written (mostly) in Malayalam [1], the language of the state of
Kerala [2] in India:

I bought this book in 1986 for 50 Rupees [3]. Since it was a great book, I
used to read it often, and many of my friends used to borrow it. Somebody
borrowed it in 2007, and I never got it back. I searched the entire world for
a copy, new or old, cheap or expensive .... I couldn't find one. Then a friend
told me that if there is a copy anywhere in the world then he would buy it for
me, no matter the price. He heard that it was available with Abe(?) Books in
the U.S for $86, and ordered a copy. I waited for it to arrive ...... Then I
got the regret message "Your consignment has been missed during transit, and
we have no additional copy. Your payment will be redeemed however." I kept up
my search. Then I got to know that a person in Koyilandy [4] had a copy, and I
took a laptop and a scanner and journeyed from one end of Kerala to the other
to reach there. It took 7 hours to scan the the entire book. I converted the
entire corpus into text and edited it to make it identical to the original
text, and added all the line drawings using CorelDraw to get it to its current
form.

If you ever get your hands on this, then keep in mind that so much effort went
into its making. Shouldn't I have done at least this much in return for the
kindness which my good friend showed me, in offering to buy the book for me
even at an exorbitant price? I offer this completed scan first to him, like a
gift of the Magi [5]. I look back and think, was it worth it? Yes, absolutely.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala)

[3] A significant sum in those days. A good meal could be had for 5 Rupees or
less in those days.

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyilandy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyilandy)

[5] He doesn't say "gift of the Magi" in so many words, but "a gift of a piece
of a commonly found plant in return for a piece of broken slate pencil", but I
guess the idea is somewhat similar.

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diziet
There is an interesting kind of a puzzle / challenge where a set of objects is
presented that follows some certain rule. The rule can be arbitrary -- these
objects are all circles, these objects are in the top portion of the box,
these objects are pictures of cats, etc. The objective is to identify the rule
in the set given, that does not fit any of the objects in another set (also
given) . I can't recall or be able to find the name of this kind of puzzle,
though!

Edit: They are called Bongard problems.
[http://www.foundalis.com/res/diss_research.html](http://www.foundalis.com/res/diss_research.html)

~~~
andrewl
That reminds me a bit of the _Set_ card game:

[http://www.amazon.com/Set-Family-Game-Visual-
Perception/dp/B...](http://www.amazon.com/Set-Family-Game-Visual-
Perception/dp/B00000IV34/)

~~~
jameshart
Along those lines, you might want to check out the card game 'Eleusis', which
was written about by Martin Gardner:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusis_(card_game)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusis_\(card_game\))

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ozh
This article made me discover thinkfun.com (for the dragon stuff) and, HOLY
WOW, that site is fricking awesome when you're brainstorming for kids'
christmas. Don't miss that.

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zcarter
If anyone is looking for a starting point to Gardner's vast works, I highly
recommend "Aha! Insight."

~~~
zem
"mathematical magic show" is another very good one; it's somewhat thicker than
most of his collections, and spans a nicely eclectic set of advanced topics.

------
leeoniya
i've made that dragon cutout illusion, it is indescribably effective. make
sure you look at it with one eye and maybe in lower lighting where the seams
arent as visible.

here are all the different color cutouts (there's a cat and dog one too):
[http://goo.gl/T05Oct](http://goo.gl/T05Oct)

