Perilous Problems for Puzzle Lovers: Math, Logic & Word Puzzles to Challenge Your Brain

by Alex Bellos

Thought you had it bad? In this book, you will be:

Imprisoned by a sadistic logician.
Challenged to raise dogs from the dead.
Trapped on a burning island.
And much more besides . . .

Everything is at stake in this compendium of more than 125 ingenious puzzles selected to reveal the wonderful diversity of brainteasers that have confounded and intrigued solvers for the last thousand years. You'll need to pit your wits against probability problems, wrestle with wordplay, grapple with geometry, and scrabble for survival.

Along the way, you will meet whip-smart thinkers of yore, eccentric novelists, and a poodle with allegedly supernatural powers. You will absorb fascinating and important mathematical ideas. Some solutions rely on ingenuity, some challenge you to spot hidden patterns, and others call for extreme rationality. All will surprise, entertain, and stretch your brain.

Will you make it out with your puzzling pride intact?

496 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 27, 2020

About the author

"I was born in Oxford and grew up in Edinburgh and Southampton. After studying mathematics and philosophy at university I joined the Evening Argus in Brighton as a trainee reporter. I joined the Guardian in 1994 as a reporter and in 1998 moved to Rio de Janeiro, where I spent five years as the paper’s South America correspondent. Since 2003 I have lived in London, as a freelance writer and broadcaster.

[...]

In 2003 I presented a five-part series on Brazil for the BBC, called Inside Out Brazil. My short films about the Amazon have been broadcast on the BBC, More 4 and Al Jazeera International."

Reviews

[Alicia Bayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wasn't the sort of puzzle book I was expecting but it was a fun read. I read some of the puzzles to my 13 y/o son who enjoys a challenge. As another reviewer pointed out on Goodreads, they are rather "mathy" but I found that good for us as homeschoolers. Bellos includes lots of historical puzzles and it was fun to read some of them to my kids. There is a variety of types of puzzles, with some picture types (rotate the rabbits so these three ears are enough for all of them, draw lines on these dots to do this, etc.) and some that are more like math word problems, plus many others.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for review.

[Laura]

I'm probably not going to give this a star rating because it wouldn't be fair. I'm more of a words logic type of puzzle lover, and this is very very mathy. If I was flipping through this book at a store, I would have easily seen that and not bought it because it's just not for me. That said, although I wasn't interested in most of the puzzles, I really liked the text surrounding them. A lot of the puzzles have historical context and academic discussion included, and I found that interesting. The history of a specific puzzle type was worth reading even when I didn't want to do the puzzle.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Alex Bellos! Why has this only got 2 ratings? 🤔