Smullyan, Raymond
Entry updated 9 September 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1919-2017) US mathematician, philosopher and author, professor of philosophy at the City University of New York and Indiana University. His popular non-academic works include many collections of ingenious logical puzzles, often – as in similar writings by Martin Gardner, Douglas Hofstadter and Ian Stewart – spiced with Fantastika. Thus the challenges in What Is the Name of This Book? The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles (coll 1978) feature Vampires, Zombies and characters from Lewis Carroll's Alice books, while The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes (coll 1979) applies the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes to dramatized retrograde-analysis Chess problems. The cumulative effect of conundrums in such books as The Lady or the Tiger? and Other Logical Puzzles (coll 1982) and especially Forever Undecided: A Puzzle Guide to Gödel (coll 1987) conveys some understanding of Gödel's famously difficult incompleteness theorem in Mathematics, often invoked in sf. Non-puzzle compilations such as This Book Needs No Title: A Budget of Living Paradoxes (coll 1980) and 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies (coll 1983) include many Thought Experiments in Perception, philosophy and Religion, variously couched as brief essays, provocative dialogues (Socratic or otherwise) and fantastic fables such as the long "Planet Without Laughter" in This Book Needs No Title. Smullyan used multiple strategies – Fantastika, Paradoxes and Taoism among them – to provoke thought in his readers. [DRL]
Raymond Merrill Smullyan
born Far Rockaway, New York: 25 May 1919
died Hudson, New York: 6 February 2017
works (non-academic titles)
nonfiction
- The Tao Is Silent (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) [nonfiction: pb/]
collections
- What Is the Name of This Book? The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1978) [nonfiction: coll: hb/]
- This Book Needs No Title: A Budget of Living Paradoxes (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1980) [nonfiction: coll: illus/Michael David Brown: hb/Hal Siegel]
- The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1979) [nonfiction: coll: hb/]
- The Chess Mysteries of the Arabian Knights: 50 New Problems of Chess Detection (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1981) [nonfiction: coll: hb/John Alcorn]
- Alice in Puzzle-Land: A Carrollian Tale for Children under Eighty (New York: William Morrow, 1982) [nonfiction: coll: introduction by Martin Gardner: illus/hb/Greer Fitting]
- The Lady or the Tiger? and Other Logical Puzzles (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1982) [nonfiction: coll: hb/John Alcorn]
- 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies (New York: St Martin's Press, 1983) [nonfiction: coll: hb/]
- To Mock a Mockingbird and Other Logic Puzzles, Including an Amazing Adventure in Combinatory Logic (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1985) [nonfiction: coll: hb/]
- Forever Undecided: A Puzzle Guide to Gödel (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1987) [nonfiction: coll: hb/from M C Escher]
- Satan, Cantor, and Infinity; and Other Mind-Boggling Puzzles (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1992) [nonfiction: coll: hb/]
- The Riddle of Scheherazade and Other Amazing Puzzles, Ancient and Modern (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1997) [nonfiction: coll: hb/]
- Logical Labyrinths (Boca Raton, Florida: A K Peters/CRC Press, 2008) [nonfiction: coll: hb/]
- King Arthur in Search of His Dog and Other Curious Puzzles (New York: Dover Publications, 2010) [nonfiction: coll: pb/]
- The Godelian Puzzle Book: Puzzles, Paradoxes and Proofs (New York: Dover Publications, 2013) [nonfiction: coll: pb/]
- The Magic Garden of George B and Other Logic Puzzles (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co, 2015) [nonfiction: coll: hb/]
- A Mixed Bag: Jokes, Puzzles, Riddles and Memorabilia (Montclair, New Jersey: Sagging Meniscus Press, 2016) [nonfiction: coll: pb/Anne Marie Hantho]
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