Raymond Smullyan has died
nytimes.com
Raymond Smullyan has died
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Re: Raymond Smullyan has died
#2I loved the puzzle books, even though I wasn't very good at the puzzles. The titbit about his wife is this story (https://magazine.uchicago.edu/9506/June95BOBProfiles.html, NYT left out the actual puzzle)
> Smullyan admits the following puzzle might have come in handy had he designed it before meeting his wife.
> "I'll make a statement. If the statement is true, you give me your autograph. It doesn't have to be on a check, it can be on a blank piece of paper. If the statement is false, you don't give me your autograph," Smullyan sets up the puzzle. "Well, my statement is, `You will give me neither your autograph nor a kiss.'
And his puzzles always came with variations, like this (http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/2010/05/raymond-smullyans-mag...):
> Afterwards, Raymond Smullyan joined me in the elevator. “Do you want to see a magic trick?” he asked. “I bet I can kiss you without touching you.” I was caught off guard. At that moment I believed anything was possible. I agreed to the bet.
> He asked me to close my eyes, kissed me on the cheek and laughed, “I lost.”
And this bit from the preface to The Lady or the Tiger aptly summarizes most people's attitude towards maths:
> Before he called the boy to the phone, the father said to me in soft conspiratorial tones: "He is reading your book and loves it! But when you speak to him, don't let him know that what he is doing is math, because he hates math! If he had any idea that this is really math, he would stop reading the book immediately!"
Re: Raymond Smullyan has died
#3One of my favorite pieces of Smullyan's writing is "Planet Without Laughter": http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/smullyan.html
Re: Raymond Smullyan has died
#4One of my favorite books is the "The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes" which describes a technique called retrograde analysis
https://www.amazon.com/Chess-Mysteries-Sherlock-Holmes-Recre...
Re: Raymond Smullyan has died
#5One of my favorite pieces of Smullyan's writing is "Planet Without Laughter": http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/smullyan.html
Here's my favorite, "Is God a Taoist?": http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTao...
Re: Raymond Smullyan has died
#6When I was an undergraduate I met Raymond at a math conference in Minnesota. We talked about logic, religion, and philosophy at the reception the first night. The next morning he sees me and runs over to me. He said,
"I invented a new religion for you last night. God has a number in mind. If the sum total of all good acts minus the sum total of all bad acts exceeds this number then everyone goes to heaven. Otherwise, everyone goes to hell. Imagine then. Something you do could send everyone to hell."
I'm sad to hear of his passing.
Re: Raymond Smullyan has died
#7One of my favorite pieces of Smullyan's writing is "Planet Without Laughter": http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/smullyan.html
Here's my favorite, "Is God a Taoist?": http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTao...
My favorite too, and also my first encounter with his writings. Read it back in the eighties as it was one of the writings discussed in "The Mind's I". It was exactly the type of initial clarification I needed to read at the time and definitely shaped my understanding on what the term "God" might point to at a time when all the other options seemed petty and infantile to a curious and perplexed teenager.
Wow. Sad to hear about his passing. He set the initial path for much of my subsequent interests.
Re: Raymond Smullyan has died
#8Relevant here, anyone interested in combinatory logic (functional programming, etc.) should check out To Mock a Mockingbird. It’s a lovely puzzle book which teaches the subject through direct experience.
Folks also might enjoy The Magic Garden of George B. (And of course, all of Smullyan’s other books.)
Re: Raymond Smullyan has died
#9My favorite Smullyan book is out of print: Forever Undecided: A Puzzle Guide to Gödel. Gödel's paradoxical theory hooked me in college, and after twenty years I still can't help but feel that it has a message for us---not in the word-play associations that some philosophers mistreat such things, but more in its implications for the human mind and artificial intelligence, along the lines that Roger Penrose explores. I've read Franzén's rejection of all attempts to "apply" Gödel's proof, and yet, I keep coming back to the idea that we can see our way "out" of these limited systems.
Anyway, Smullyan's book is a real treat. In the later chapters he even goes beyond Gödel. I've never completely figured out how much of that is Smullyan and how much is other published research.
Re: Raymond Smullyan has died
#10"The Lady or the Tiger" is, quite literally, probably the single most influential book from my childhood. In 6th grade, my math teacher had a copy in his classroom. He noticed that I spent so much time before class, after class, (during class) reading it, that at the end of the school year he told me I could take it home so long as I promised to bring it back at the end of the summer. (He was also the 7th and 8th grade math teacher.)
I took that book home and treasured it for the whole summer, pouring over each puzzle, solving each one without peeking at the answers, then comparing my answers to the ones in the back of the book. By the end of the summer I think there were only 1 or 2 I hadn't been able to work out myself. Sure enough, as the first day of 7th grade rolled around, it was in my backpack and promptly returned to the shelf of my math teacher's classroom. Satisfied that I had gotten all I could from "The Lady or the Tiger", I next turned my attention to the Apple IIe he had sitting in the corner and a book entitled "Apple Basic".
The rest, as they say, is history.
One final note...as I continued through school and university, I gradually came to realize that Taoism was the school of philosophy that matched most closely to how I understood the world and is, in some sense, the closest thing I have to a "religion". It wasn't until much later in life (well after I turned 30), that I happened to stumble back across Smullyan and his writings, only to discover that he was also a rather adroit Taoist philosopher. (His "Is God a Taoist?" essay, http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTao... is highly recommended.)
To this day I wonder if "The Lady or the Tiger" didn't have more of an impact on my early development than simply fostering a love of logic...