The paperback reprint of Smullyan's most successful book of puzzles--a mind-bending, pleasurable romp through the world of logic. For all ages and all levels of difficulty, these puzzles range from those that can be solved in minutes to those that will beguile for hours.
Logic concepts are more mainstream than you may realize. There’s logic every place you look and in almost everything you do, from deciding which shirt to buy to asking your boss for a raise, and even to watching television, where themes of such shows as CSI and Numbers incorporate a variety of logistical studies. Logic For Dummies explains a vast array of logical concepts and processes in easy-to-understand language that make everything clear to you, whether you’re a college student of a student of life.
The nineteenth century is widely and rightly held to be the century in which the mathematical revolution in logic achieved its breakthrough. W.V. Quine once remarked that logic is an ancient discipline, but since 1879 it has been a great one. Of course, 1879 marks the publication of Gottlob Frege’s Begriffsschrift, and 1870 and 1883 the appearance of Charles Peirce’s “Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives” and “Note B: The Logic of Relatives”. Frege and Peirce are the independent co-founders of modern quantification theory. Frege (1848–1925) was a German and Peirce (1839–1914) an American (their contributions are chronicled in volume three of this Handbook, The Rise of Mathematical Logic: Leibniz to Frege). Although Frege’s work was little recognized and little appreciated by British logicians of the period — Russell was a late exception — important steps toward the mathematicization of logic were taken in Britain. Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) made significant contributions to the logic of relatives, of which Peirce took respectful heed, and also to probability theory, an interest in which he did much to revive...
You've come to the right place! The 20 lessons in this book are designed to help you prepare for the reasoning and logic questions on your exam. You'll learn the rules of inductive and deductive reasoning and see how to avoid falling into logic traps, learning how to answer all kinds of questions you might be asked as you work through the lessons. Examples and practice exercises are presented in test format and will give you plenty of practice. So come exam day . . . you'll be prepared to score your best.
This book presents a unified formal approach to various contemporary linguistic formalisms such as Government and Binding, Minimalism or Tree Adjoining Grammar. Through a careful introduction of mathematical techniques from logic, automata theory and universal algebra, the book aims at graduate students and researchers who want to learn more about tightly constrained logical approaches to natural language syntax. Therefore it features a complete and well illustrated introduction to the connection between declarative approaches formalized in monadic second-order logic (MSO) and generative ones formalized in various forms of automata as well as of tree grammars. Since MSO logic (on trees) yields only context-free languages, and at least the last two of the formalisms mentioned above clearly belong to the class of mildly context-sensitive formalisms, it becomes necessary to deal with the problem of the descriptive complexity of the formalisms involved in another way. The proposed genuinely new two-step approach overcomes this limitation of MSO logic while still retaining the desired tightly controlled formal properties.
