Full name: Forever Undecided: A Puzzle Guide to Godel

Author: Raymond Smullyan Year: 1987 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780192821966 9780394549439 0192821962 0394549430

A challenging puzzle collection and an instructive and entertaining introduction to Kurt Godel's famous theorems, including incompleteness and undecidability. Much of the action of the book takes place on an imaginary and magical island, the Island of Knights and Knaves, where knights always make true statements, knaves always make false statements, and every inhabitant is either a knight or a knave. Here we meet an amazing array of characters, visitors to the island, seeking to determine the natives' true identities. Among them are the census-taker McGregor; a philosopher-logician in search of his flighty bird-wife Oona; and a regiment of Reasoners. By following the Reasoners through brain-tingling exercises and adventures - including journeys into the "other possible worlds" of Kripke semantics - even the most illogical of us should come to understand Godel's theorems, some of their philosophical and mathematical implications and why we, like Godel himself, must remain forever undecided! The book is intended for puzzle fans of every age and ability - from the high-school whizz to the seasoned mathematician, logician or computer scientist. Similar books: Satan, Cantor, and Infinity by Raymond Smullyan The Riddle of Scheherazade by Raymond Smullyan What is the Name of this Book? by Raymond Smullyan From Frege to Godel by Jean van Heijenoort My Best Mathematical & Logic Puzzles by Martin Gardner The Lady or the Tiger? And Other Logic Puzzles Including a Mathematical Novel That Features Godel's Great Discovery by Raymond Smullyan This Book Needs No Title by Raymond Smullyan Introduction to Logic by Patrick Suppes Set Theory and Its Logic by W. V. Quine Godel's Incompleteness Theorems by Raymond Smullyan Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences by Alfred Tarski The Moscow Puzzles by Boris A. Kordemsky Amusements in Mathematics by Henry Ernest Dudeney On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems by Kurt Godel