Math Puzzles and Games

by Michael Holt

This is a great little book to help discover the excitement of mathematical puzzles. As this book shows, mathematics is not always hard extremely abstract mind-boggling stuff. In fact it can encompass playful and fun problems. Many famous mathematicians are known to be devoted to puzzle solving of one kind or another. This kind of problem solving play often leads to more significant scientific discoveries. Maybe one of these problems will lead you to such discoveries!

In these notes, I provide up-to date detailed solutions to many of the problems posed by Holt. In addition, in the case where it is prudent to do so I implement python (and sometimes R) codes to help in the enumeration of the choices and facilitate finding solutions. Reading these notes and solutions is a good way to learn a bit about the very popular and powerful programming language python. I hope that this book will help you become a stronger problem solver and open your eyes to the possibility of using python as a language to help solve your own problems. People unfamiliar with this book can see what others have said about it on amazon here.

Notes on the Book:
Simple Code For Various Problems:
As always, I am interested in hearing about any errors that might exist in this material.

John Weatherwax
Last modified: Mon Jan 27 06:28:56 EST 2014