Mathematical and Algorithmic Puzzles

Pramod Ganapathi

May 2024 ·

About this ebook

This book presents serious mathematical and algorithmic puzzles that are mostly counterintuitive. The presented puzzles are simultaneously entertaining, challenging, intriguing, and haunting. This book introduces its readers to counterintuitive mathematical ideas and revolutionary algorithmic insights from a wide variety of topics. The presented solutions that are discovered by many mathematicians and computer scientists are highly counterintuitive and show supreme mathematical beauty. These counterintuitive solutions are intriguing to the degree that they shatter our preconceived notions, shake our long-held belief systems, debunk our fundamental intuitions, and finally rob us of sleep and haunt us for a lifetime. Multiple ways of attacking the same puzzle are presented which teach the application of elegant problem-solving strategies.

About the author

Pramod Ganapathi is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University (SBU) learning/teaching/researching mathematics/algorithms/puzzles. He has published a book, published 15+ papers in reputed international conferences/journals, been granted a US patent, won two Outstanding Paper Awards, taught 10+ courses in 25+ offerings, and has supervised 90+ master's/bachelor students. Before joining SBU, he was an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Indore. Before joining IIT, he was the founder and CEO of an animation-based online higher education startup called "Learning is Beautiful", in India. Before founding his startup, he received his Ph.D. in computer science at SBU, specializing in parallel algorithms. His Ph.D. work is entitled "Automatic Discovery of Efficient Divide-and-Conquer Algorithms for Dynamic Programming Problems" and was supervised by Prof. Rezaul A. Chowdhury. Before pursuing Ph.D., he was a Software Engineer at IBM India Software Labs.