Raymond Smullyan; created logic puzzles . By Richard Sandomir New York
Times . NEW YORK - Raymond Smullyan, whose merry, agile mind led him to
be a musician, a magician, a mathematician, and, most cunningly, a
puzzle-creating logician, died Feb. 6 in Hudson, N.Y. He was 97. Dr.
Smullyan was a serious mathematician, with the publications and the
doctorate to prove it. But his greatest legacy might be the devilishly
clever logic puzzles he devised, presenting them in books or just in
casual conversation. Sometimes they were one-offs, and sometimes they
were embedded in longer narratives to explain mathematical concepts,
such as Boolean logic, as he did in "The Magic Garden of George B and
Other Logic Puzzles" in 2015; or retrograde analysis, as he explored in
the "The Chess Mysteries of the Arabian Knights" in 1981. He was also a
character. With his long white hair and beard, Dr. Smullyan resembled
Ian McKellen's wizard, Gandalf, from the "Lord of the Rings" film
series. He hated exercise and loved steak and eggs. He studied Eastern
religion. He told corny jokes and performed close-up magic to anyone
near him. He played the piano with passion and talent into his 90s. (A
career in music had been derailed by tendinitis when he was a young
man.) And he was fond of his philosophical, if silly, sayings, such as,
"Why should I worry about dying? It's not going to happen in my
lifetime! Melvin Fitting, a retired professor of mathematics,
philosophy, and computer science at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York, recalled Dr. Smullyan's demeanor as his teacher
at Yeshiva University in the 1960s. "He'd be smiling in anticipation of
the many beautiful things he was going to show you," the professor
said. Dr. Smullyan saw beauty in the puzzles he created, seemingly
nonstop, over the decades, and viewed them as tools to spread the
gospel of mathematics. In his 1982 book "The Lady or the Tiger? And
Other Logic Puzzles," he wrote about the greater popularity Euclid's
"Elements" would have achieved had the Greek mathematician framed it as
a puzzle book. He wrote: "Problem: Given a triangle with two equal
sides, are two of the angles necessarily equal? Why, or why not? His
puzzles were so much a part of his identity that he posed one on his
first date with his future wife, Blanche de Grab. He offered a
statement that, in the way he framed it, could only result in a kiss
from her. Reminiscing about it, he wrote that it was a "pretty sneaky
way of winning a kiss, wasn't it? Jason Rosenhouse, a mathematics
professor at James Madison University, who edited a book in 2015
celebrating Dr. Smullyan, said the clarity of his puzzles could unveil
the beauty of math to those who could not previously grasp it. "It was
like fooling a kid into eating his vegetables," Rosenhouse said in an
interview, adding, "Raymond took something like Godel's incompleteness
theorems and used a string of logic puzzles as a device for presenting
them. Martin Gardner, himself a renowned math puzzler, compared Dr.
Smullyan to the Oxford logician Charles Dodgson, who also was an author
better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll. Dr. Smullyan paid tribute
to Carroll in his 1982 book "Alice in Puzzle-Land: A Carrollian Tale
for Children Under Eighty. In one chapter, Dr. Smullyan wrote, Alice
thinks to herself about how confusing, yet remarkably logical, Humpty
Dumpty is. "I wonder," she says, "how he manages to be both confusing
and logical? There was, it would seem, some confusing logic in the
zigzagging path of Dr. Smullyan's life. Raymond Merrill Smullyan was
born in Queens, N.Y. His father, Isidore, was a businessman; his
mother, the former Rosina Freedman, a homemaker. His education was
peripatetic and eclectic. He attended Pacific University and Reed
College in Oregon, then studied mathematics on his own. He created
chess puzzles that were more concerned about moves that had been made
than the ones that should be made. He put together a magic act, and
performed under the stage name Five-Ace Merrill at nightclubs like the
Pump Room in Chicago, where he worked for tips. He earned a bachelor's
degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a PhD from
Princeton. He taught at Princeton, Yeshiva, the City University of New
York, and Indiana University. His philosophy of teaching was a little
puzzling. "My policy is to teach the student as much as possible and to
require from him or her as little as possible," he said in 2008. But,
he added, the effect of his apparent lenience was that many students
worked harder in his course than in any other.
