Amusements in Mathematics

Rating:
Summary: One of the classics of Puzzledom
Review: Dudeney was one of the two fathers of puzzles today. Amusements in Mathematics has many of Dudeney's best puzzles. An excellent book.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing math teasers for ages 11 up, brilliantly answered
Review: This excellent collection of teasers has inferential problems in arithmetic and algebra, and includes geometry, mazes, magic squares and a lot of chess-board tours. The answers are often gems in themselves -- things mentioned in passing and left to the reader to establish -- e.g. "... of the twelve ways that eight queens can be placed on a chessboard without attacking one another..." At twelve years old I spent many an hour finding those twelve ways. There is a small problem with the age of the book, first published in 1917. You could buy an airplane for 400 pounds ($1,680) then, and the money puzzles in the first chapter assume familiarity with British pounds, shillings and pence (and ha'pennies and farthings). The Dover edition of 1958 included a preface on British coins and stamps, and another on the game of cricket, but this edition was in 8vo rather than the original quarto, making some of the diagrams very small. I received my copy in 1936, at age eleven, and have cherished it ever since. I still find challenges in it in spite of my Masters degree in Mathematical Physics!