Maybe its that I'm looking at the past through rose colored glasses, but when I read this I did'nt experience the same sense of wonder that I did when I was 13. Martin touches on very very cool topics, but my main gripe is that he whizzes through everything, often just giving a pointer to another book, which is great in that it encourages more exploration but is frustrating at the same time. But if you havent encountared recreational mathematics before, take a look, Martin does a wonderful job in making math FUN!

Reading this takes me back to time spent in my school's library poring over Gardner's columns in Scientific American. Several of the columns in this book I first read as a nerdy 14 year old and was staggered then (as I am now) by the elegance and beauty of the ideas they contained. Now I read it with a far greater appreciation of the problems and ideas expressed, but that doesn't compare with the sheer sense of wonder I experienced first time around.

The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Casey fans that day,

For their favorite ballad's history was fading fast away.

So when "Casey's Wife" was hard to find, and other poems were worse,

A pallor wreathed the features of the patrons of the verse.

A staggering few gave up the search, leaving there the rest,

With hope that springs eternal, within the human breast.

For they thought if only Gardner would take a careful look,

They'd put their hard-earned money down, if Gardner wrote a book.

But collecting all the parodies was too much work to do;

Mad Magazine had written one; and Grantland Rice wrote two.

And so the stricken multitude might never get to know 'em,

For there seemed but little chance of learning all about the poem.

But Dover publications has a Casey book to read,

With every bit of Casey lore that you will ever need.

To find these old forgotten poems, you need just take a look,

For Gardner, Martin Gardner, has compiled them in a book.

There is fun in Gardner's comments; there is wit from this old sage;

There are reams of careful research, and notes on every page.

So if you click the button, and wait a day or two,

There'll be Casey on your bookshelf, with all the others, too.

...

Oh, somewhere in these fabled lands, the sun is all too dim,

A band is silent somewhere, and somewhere hopes are slim,

And baseball lore is fading, and no one cares a bit,

But there is great joy in Mudville - Martin Gardner's scored a hit!

If humans are so smart, why do they behave so stupidly? Why are the talking monkeys so greedy and hateful? Where did civilization go wrong? The author of "The Time Machine" tries to figure it all out in this oft-overlooked and slim volume of original, non-fiction essays.

Martin Gardner is a provocative writer whose writings do not please people who believe in esp and such things. His views on creationism are instructive nad require to be carefully studied by people who still oppose scientific evolutionism. This book is one of his better works and is essentially a must to read for all those who love Martin's works

Gardner weaves the magic of mathematics again in this awesome math "thriller". After 'Time Travel', this is the second book I read, and I think Gardner does a wonderful job of going about math in a non-boring way. At some points of time, I had difficulty understanding whether I am supposed to be a complete novice or an advanced student, hence the 4 stars.

First, a small correction. This collection of mathematical essays was assembled as a tribute to Martin Gardner, on the occasion (20 years ago!) of his retirement. This book was not edited by Gardner, but it is in the same spirit (and the same size) as his "Mathematical Games" books of his Scientific American columns, so it does make a nice companion volume.

There are lots of good things in this book, but the best is Doris Schattschneider's essay "In Praise of Amateurs," on the ways of tiling the plane with convex pentagons. Does this sound like an incredibly arcane, useless subject? Well, I suppose it is, but it's also a delicious story, and this volume is the only place where I have seen it told in full. There are 13 essentially different ways to tile the plane with convex pentagons. Many of these beautiful patterns were discovered by Marjorie Rice, a San Diego housewife with only a high school education. Furthermore, she discovered these designs years after it was "proved" that there were only eight ways. If you thought the aperiodic Penrose tiling of the plane was a fascinating discovery, you will want to read this essay, admire these 13 patterns, and ideally find a fourteenth.

This essay alone is worth the price of the book. While the rest of the book is not quite up to its standard, it too is quite worthwhile. There are essays by Scott Kim, Donald E. Knuth, H.S.M. Coxeter, Solomon W. Golomb, and many others, all clearly illustrated. The section on 3-dimensional tiling is also quite cool.

If there were a mathematics of watching paint dry, Martin Gardner would make it interesting. Without peer as a popularizer of mathematics, he is equally adept at explaining all areas. This book, another updated collection of his Scientific American columns, is a twenty member set of polished pearls. Although somewhat mundane as a descriptive adjective, the word readable fits his writing like a custom made body stocking.
Always interesting and entertaining, reading his essays is somewhat like eating tiny chocolate bars. You can't get enough, each seems too small, and there are no negative side effects.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

Okay, this isn't an astronomy textbook, but in a quick and easy to read volume, Gardner provides some clear explanations of some interesting puzzle like questions. No previous knowledge is assumed, so the book will be a bit easy for the serious astronomer, but I don't believe that's whom the book is intended for. In fact, I'd recommend buying it for an interested middle schooler or high school student to stimulate their interest int he solar system. Very entertaining, quick and easy to read with some complicated problems explained.

Lewis Carroll was in "real life" Charles Dodgson, lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University and author of books on geometry and logic. Mathematics intrudes into his children's books, especially Sylvie and Bruno. There is nobody better qualified to explain this side of Lewis Carroll to the non-mathematician than Martin Gardner, author of the Annotated Alice and for many years the compiler of the Mathematical Puzzles column in Scientific American. This book will delight Carroll's many fans and may intrigue many who would not normally be attracted to children's fiction. I also recommend the two books on Lewis Carroll's puzzles by Edward Wakeling; as a professional mathematician, he brings a complementary perspective.

While parts of this book devoted to the popular description of concepts of modern physics and mathematics hold a pedagogical value for a lay reader, the rest of the book is really poor. The author makes an extremely loose connections between completely unconnected problems, and with surprising immodesty puts forward an extremely contrived theory of mind without providing any semblance of logic, let alone proof. For any scientist familiar with both quantum mechanics and some basic knowledge of biology of the CNS, the main thesis of the book that consciousness is somehow connected to the quantum mechanics of the brain function should certainly look ridiculous; it's a completely arbitrary connection, and no proof is even suggested. The author in effect attempts to employ a very cheap trick to solve two of the greatest problems of modern science and philosophy, the problem of consciousness and the problem of (apparent) ambiguities in the formulation of quantum physics, by deciding to cancel them against each other, linking them with an arbitrary mental construction. How convenient! The suggestion that Godel's theorem proves that human thought is non-algorithmic is laughable; while the theorem is one of the greatest achievements of modern logic, it is only relevant for symbol-based computation, and our brain certainly isn't a purely symbol-manipulating machine: most neural-network computations are not based on applying symbolic rules, although they can be implicitly algorithmic. Besides, to suggest that humans can never encounter a statement that can be neither proved nor disproved is almost humorous in its arrogance: the problem of consciousness alone holds lots of such examples; problems of ethics is another great example. Penrose's argument will only be applicable when we discover a theory of everything and there will be no philosophical questions left to be solved for humanity; only in that case one could say that there are no contradictory statements for a human mind. ...I could go on and on, but this is too long already. I personally find it fascinating that an undoubtedly talented scientist like Penrose, one of the greatest mathematicians of our times, can come up with something as absurd. I guess this can teach the rest of us something about how the human brain works, after all...

I will be quick in this review.
First, the physics are stimulating, the brain science lacking, the speculation interesting. But the aruments are absolutely and completely flawed. Its not just that quantum effects almost certianly have no effects on consicousness, or cognition for that matter, and the argument implicitly made: "quantum is mysterious, consciousness is mysterious, so they are interrelated" is ridiculous.

It all starts with the church-turing thesis. Any algorithmically computabele process, can be carried out by an universal turing macine (for our purposes, a computer). Now the idea is too figure out if computers can have a mind like a brain has one. Penrose holds that it is not posible, so he asks the right question: "is the human mind algorithmically computable?". Penrose says "no", and his reasons are simple: humans can see the truth of godel propositions, and human mathematicians have sudden "insights" that are, well, supposedly non-computable. The first thing one can do, is, well, hold that in fact the human mind is indeed computable. The truth is that this is a pretty fair bet. Just look at the neural-network progress made in PDP. Actually it is on Penrose to prove us that the essentials of mind and consciousness (not godel propositions)are non-computable. But at the end, Penrose seems to beg the question.

Now the Godel argument is a little bit more straightforward, but wrong nontheless. If anything, Penrose argues that a computer could not do certain kinds of math, not that they couldnt have a mind . I doubt knowledge of Godel propositions add a mind to a system. But even if we agree with the claims that the mind can do certain things non-computably, it does not follow that consciousness is one of these (remember at the end the book is about consciousness). Now quantum processes are certainly non-computable, so Pernose's claim is that consciousness arises from quantum processes. The problem is that none of this follows from any other discussion before! The quantum is only one non-computable process that could exist in the brain. Also,remember that quantum effects are probably inexistent in such a noisy and hot system like the brain. One even can doubt Penroses claim that there exists mathemathical insight of any kind not explainable in some other way than the quantum. Hammeroff and Nancy Wolf are much better quantum-consciousness theorists, and this review still applies to an extent to Penrose's Shadows of the Mind. I would argue quantum-consciousness is still considered as a real option because it is popular outside the academia. This book was a best seller. But on real scientific terms, it is a no starter. I'm sure some philosophers and physicists might embrace Peroses attempts, but there are still scientists and philosophers that deny the theory of evolution.
It is a good read, and everyone serious in consciousness studies should try to read it, if only for historical reasons. This book is probably a popular science classic allready.

Roger Penrose, one of the world's top physicists, summarizes modern science, examining topics including Turing machines, relativity, quantum physics, black holes, etc. At the end, he argues that the human mind can not be simulated by computers or anything algorithmic. The Emperor's New Mind is my favorite book, although I didn't feel that way the first time I read it. It is quite technical, compared to, for instance, A Brief History of Time, which covers some of the same topics. The second time I read the book, I really dedicated a lot of time to understand the material as well as I could, often working out problems with paper and pencil. This was necessary for me to see that his conclusion was related to the rest of the book. While Penrose obviously can not "prove" his belief, he gives a strong, fascinating arguement, and the book has definitely affected my philosophical views concerning consciousness.