This collection by best-selling author David Wells, a Cambridge math scholar and teacher, consists of more than 560 puzzles. Its first half is devoted to puzzle... » 

This collection by best-selling author David Wells, a Cambridge math scholar and teacher, consists of more than 560 puzzles. Its first half is devoted to puzzles from ancient Egypt and Babylon and subsequent sources, including those devised by Lewis Carroll, Eduard Lucas, and other famous mathematicians; the tremendous variety of twentieth-century puzzles constitutes the second half. Ranging from the mind-sharpeners of a medieval monk to the eighteenth-century Ladies' Diary, the Hindu Bhakshali manuscript, and riddles and popular rhymes, these problems require no mathematics beyond the most elementary algebra and geometry--and few require even that. Complete answers to every puzzle appear at the end. «