Dennis E Shasha - The Puzzler's Elusion torrent

Puzzler's Elusion: A Tale of Fraud, Pursuit, and the Art of Logic,

by Dennis E. Shasha


#Pages : 192.
#Publisher : Running Press Book Publishers, 2006
#ISBN-13 : 9781560258315
#Format : EPUB


Genius mathematician, Dr. Dennis Shasha, here sets out his latest
book-length mind-twister. Made up of many smaller segments, some of
which can be solved by ten year-olds and some which are more
challenging, the detective work requires no more than high school
geometry and junior high school algebra. In every case, imagination
trumps knowledge.

The puzzles are set in a larger story of a mathematical detective
named Dr. Ecco, his nephew and niece, and Professor Scarlet, the
narrator. Scarlet is essentially the Watson to Dr. Ecco's Sherlock
Holmes, asking the questions a reader might ask. Each puzzle is posed
in a plausible if imaginary real-life setting. There are no hidden
facts, no abduction here, just deductive logic and mathematical
thought.

Overlaying these puzzles are the ramblings of Dr Ecco's old nemesis,
Benjamin Baskerhound. He seems to be on the run, but he's trying to
tell Ecco his whereabouts in a way that only Ecco will understand. The
evidence builds up and readers are invited to send in their solutions.
The winner will receive a pre-paid trip to the home of modern
mathematics, Sir Isaac Newton's Greenwich Observatory.


Author
======

Dr. Dennis Shasha is a professor of computer science at the Courant
Institute of NYU where he works with biologists on pattern discovery
for microarrays, combinatorial design, and network inference; and with
physicists and financial people on algorithms for time series. Other
areas of interest include database tuning, tree and graph matching,
and cryptographic file systems. Because he "likes to type", he has
written four books of puzzles, a biography about great computer
scientists, and technical books about database tuning, biological
pattern recognition and time series. He also writes the puzzle columns
for Scientific American and Dr. Dobb's Journal.

After graduating from Yale, Shasha worked for IBM designing circuits
and microcode. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1984. He
has written many books, including four involving the mathematical
detective Dr. Ecco for W.H. Freeman and W.W. Norton, and a book of
biographies about great computer scientists called Out of Their Minds:
the lives and discoveries of 15 great computer scientists. In
addition, he has co-written fifty journal papers, sixty conference
papers, and seven patents.

-_-