Thursday, June 26, 2014

Skimpression- Second Book Review: Amusements in Mathematics

Amusements in Mathematics: H.E.Dudeney
This book is an entire book dedicated to riddles, puzzles, and games found in Mathematics. Topics such as algebra, geometry, puzzle games, magic square problems, crossing river problems, measuring, weighing, and packing puzzles are included in this book. This book also comes with a complete solution guide for each problem.
I decided to choose a couple of problems throughout the book and attempt to solve them.
#424: The Dovetailed Block
This problem shows the following photo.
 The problem says that the non visible sides of this cube all look exactly the same. Then how were the pieces put together?
Below is an example I found, that is similar to the solution in the back of Dudeney's book.

#246: Visiting the Towns
This problem gave the diagram shown below.
 
 And asked if the traveler "wishes to visit every town once, and once only, going only by roads indicated by straight lines." You have to determine how many different routes are there to select. The traveler must end his route at town number one from which he started.
Below is my work for this problem. I began by re-arranging the numbers so that there was more of a clear path to travel and finished to conclude that there is only one pathway the traveler can take.
These are just two of the many different types of problems provided in the book. Overall this is a fun book to use if you are looking for a quick puzzle to solve.

1 comment:

  1. Simpression, check. It is a good source of puzzles - glad you included a couple.

    ReplyDelete