Amusements in Mathematics

Henry Ernest Dudeney gathered his mathematical puzzles into this book in 1917, many of them first printed in magazines such as The Strand Magazine and Tit-Bits. His preface states the aim plainly: the reader is there to be amused, with some hope of picking up scraps of knowledge along the way.

The problems are sorted by kind: money puzzles, ages and kinship, clocks, speed, digits, dissections, chessboard problems, river crossings, magic squares and mazes. They are deliberately not ordered by difficulty, and the author warns that a question that looks simple may hide a trap. Solutions fill the back of the book, some worked at length and some given as bare answers. A note at the start explains pre-decimal British coinage, since many puzzles are priced in pennies, shillings and pounds.

Several sections are framed as talk around a family table, where a curate, a young man and the rest of the household trade questions, including one about a steel girdle round the earth.