The Riddle of Scheherazade

In his new book, Raymond Smullyan, grand vizier of the logic puzzle, joins Scheherazade, a charming young woman of “fantastic logical ingenuity,” to give us 1001 hours of brain-teasing fun. Scheherazade, we find, has gotten back into hot water with the king, and is once more in danger of losing her head at down. But, thinking quickly, she tempts the king to stay her execution by posing him the most delightfully devious mathematical and logic puzzle ever invented. They keep him guessing for many more nights until the fatal hour has passed, and she keeps her head. The Riddle of Scheherazade includes several wonderful old chestnuts and many fiendishly original puzzles, 225 in all. There are logic tricks and number games, metapuzzles (puzzles about puzzles), liar/truth-teller exercises, Gödelian brian twisters, baffling paradoxes, and an excursion, under Scheherazade’s expert guidance, into an amusing new field invented by Smullyan, called “coercive” logic, in which the answer to a problem can actually change the fate of the puzzler! An absolute must for all puzzle fans—from the middle-school whiz to the sophisticated mathematician or computer scientist.