The Canterbury Puzzles, and Other Curious Problems

Henry Ernest Dudeney gathered 114 mathematical brain-teasers into this 1907 collection, and he dressed many of them in costume. The opening section hands its puzzles to the pilgrims of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, so the Reeve, the Weaver, and their companions pose problems of geometry, arithmetic, and logic as if on the road to the shrine. Later chapters move through Solvamhall Castle, the merry monks of Riddlewell, a king’s jester, and the adventures of a puzzle club, each with its own curious challenge. Full solutions and notes follow every group. The book includes his famous spider-and-fly problem and the celebrated dissection of a square into an equilateral triangle. For readers who enjoy recreational mathematics, it remains a founding text, light in its framing and genuinely hard in its problems.