Can You Solve My Problems?: A Casebook of Ingenious, Perplexing and Totally Satisfying Puzzles

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Guardian Faber Publishing, 2017 - Games & Activities - 352 pages
Are you smarter than a Singaporean ten-year-old? Can you beat Sherlock Holmes? If you think the answer is yes - I challenge you to solve my problems. Here is the story of the puzzle, one of mankind's oldest and greatest forms of entertainment and enlightenment, told through 125 of the world's best brainteasers from the last two millennia. It takes us from ancient China to medieval Europe, Victorian England to modern-day Japan, with stories of espionage, mathematical breakthroughs and puzzling rivalries along the way. You'll pit your wits against logic puzzles and kinship riddles, pangrams and river-crossing conundrums. Some solutions rely on a touch of cunning, others call for creativity, others need mercilessly logical thought. Some can only be solved by 2% of the population. All are guaranteed to sharpen your mind. Let's get puzzling...

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About the author (2017)

Alex Bellos is the bestselling author of ;i Alex's Adventures in Numberland;/i, which was shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize. He is the i Guardian's maths-blogger, and has worked for the paper in London and Rio de Janeiro as its unusually numerate foreign correspondent. He is a curator- in-residence at the Science Museum and has a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Oxford. He made the shortlist for the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books with his title, Alex through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life.

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