Satan, Cantor, And Infinity And Other Mind-bogglin
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- ¥650
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- ¥650
発行者による作品情報
More than two hundred new and challenging logic puzzles—the simplest brainteaser to the most complex paradoxes in contemporary mathematical thinking—from our topmost puzzlemaster (“the most entertaining logician who ever lived,” Martin Gardner has called him).
Our guide to the puzzles is the Sorcerer, who resides on the Island of Knights and Knaves, where knights always tell the truth and knaves always lie, and he introduces us to the amazing magic—logic—that enables to discover which inhabitants are which. Then, in a picaresque adventure in logic, he takes us to the planet Og, to the Island of Partial Silence, and to a land where metallic robots wearing strings of capital letters are noisily duplicating and dismantling themselves and others. The reader’s job is to figure out how it all works.
Finally, we accompany the Sorcerer on an alluring tour of Infinity which includes George Cantor’s amazing mathematical insights. The tour (and the book) ends with Satan devising a diabolical puzzle for one of Cantor’s prize students—who outwits him!
In sum: a devilish magician’s cornucopia of puzzles—a delight for every age and level of ability.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Smullyan's latest challenging collection of logic puzzles, the Sorcerer, a logician who uses logic so cleverly it seems like magic, visits an island where intelligent robots create other robots. King Zorn, Princess Annabelle, truth-telling knights and lying knaves lighten the presentation of puzzles as the Sorcerer explains the pioneering discoveries of mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918) who proved that there are different orders of infinity, and as he delves into paradoxes about probability, time and change. Smullyan ( The Lady or the Tiger? ) tosses in metapuzzles (which are solved on the basis of knowing that certain other puzzles can or cannot be solved) and explores self-referentiality, a property crucial to Kurt Godel's famous incompleteness theorem. The Sorcerer closes with a tale of how Satan is outwitted by a student of Cantor's. A mind-stretching entertainment for the serious, dedicated puzzle-solver.
