This collection of short detective stories provides an exciting new challenge for young adults who have graduated beyond the ever-popular Encyclopedia Brown mysteries series and are interested in applying high school level mathematics and physics to solve problems. The main character, Ravi, is a 14-year-old math genius who helps the local police solve cases. Each chapter is a detective story with a mathematical puzzle at its core that Ravi is able to solve; the author invites the reader to solve the case on his or her own and then explains the mathematics used to find the solution to the puzzle.

This collection includes more than 100 of the best (and some of the toughest)mathematical puzzles ever to appear in one volume.

You'll need a love for mathematical reasoning and a streak of determination. You won't need a professional acquaintance with mathematics; a motivated high school student has what it takes! If you're up to the challenge, there's even a chapter on Unsolved Puzzles.

Packing spheres, Reversi, braids, polyominoes, board games, and the puzzles of Lewis Carroll. These and other mathematical diversions return to readers with updates to all the chapters, including new game variations, mathematical proofs, and other developments and discoveries. Read about Knuth's Word Ladders program and the latest developments in the digits of pi. Once again these timeless puzzles will charm readers while demonstrating principles of logic, probability, geometry, and other fields of mathematics.

From the ancients' first readings of the innards of birds to your neighbor's last bout with the state lottery, humankind has put itself into the hands of chance. In our modern world, life itself may be at stake when probability comes into play-in the chance of a false negative in a medical test, in the reliability of DNA findings as legal evidence, or in the likelihood of passing on a deadly congenital disease-yet even today, few people understand the odds. This book is aimed at the trouble with trying to learn about probability. A story of the misconceptions and difficulties civilization overcame in progressing toward probabilistic thinking, Randomness is also a skillful account of what makes the science of probability so daunting in our own time.

In his most popular book since THE LADY OR THE TIGER? the grand vizier of the puzzle world gives us 1001 hours of brain-teasing fun. Smullyan includes wonderful old chestnuts and some fiendishly original puzzles, 225 in all. An absolute must for all puzzle fans from the middle-school whiz to the sophisticated matematician or computer scientist.

Sudoku has become a vastly popular and even addictive game. But fans may not know that Sudoku is a recent offshoot of the venerable Magic Square, which dates back over 4,000 years to ancient China, where it was literally considered magical. Indeed, Magic Squares have fascinated centuries of mystics, astrologers, and some of the world's most brilliant thinkers, including Ben Franklin.
In Before Sudokus, Seymour Block and Santiago Tavares offer a crystal clear and engaging tour of Magic Squares, tracing their footsteps through through ancient and medieval history and illuminating their uses in art and design, statistics and electronics. The book provides a delightful account of a mind-boggling variety of magical squares, ranging from simple 3 x 3 and squares, to magic cubes, magic circles, magic pyramids, and even "the Beastly Magical Square," whose magic sum is 666. Of course, the authors also cover Sudoku, describing how the game became a world-wide phenomenon and revealing various strategies for solving the puzzles. And along the way, the book offers readers many fascinating facts--for instance, Sudoku was invented in 1979 by an American architect living in Indianapolis and was originally called Number Place. Oddly enough, though the puzzle is known around the world by its Japanese name (which means "single numbers"), many Japanese still call it Number Place. We also learn that in a 4 x 4 magic square, there are 880 different solutions that will yield the magic sum of 34--a surprisingly large number until you remember that there are over 2.6 trillion possible combinations.
Filled with lots of original puzzles for gamers to solve, Before Sudokus is an entertaining book that will delight anyone who loves a challenge, including all fans of Sudoku.