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*Is Gödel's incompleteness theorem one of the hardest results to understand? That is what everyone thought — until they read the works of Raymond Smullyan. This brilliant logician, who has just died at the age of 98, engaged his readers in playful logic throughout books with telling titles: Quel est le titre de ce livre ?, Le livre qui rend fou, Ça y est, je suis fou !, and many others… published in French by Dunod, who even gathered them into a compilation. Astonishingly, by the end of the problem-solving process, the reader makes the proof of Gödel's theorem their own!*
Magician, musician, philosopher, astronomer, chess player, logician… Smullyan excelled at each of his passions — going as far as publishing books or recording piano pieces. But it was with the last of these that he built up a community of admirers who never missed one of his puzzles, whether entirely original or reworked from well-known problems.
The characters he created also went on to inspire a great many authors of logic games. This is the case with Inspector Craig, a sort of Sherlock Holmes who unmasks murderers through mathematics, or with the Knights (who always tell the truth), the Knaves (who always lie) and the Normals (unpredictable).
These, which are the subject of the excerpts you can read by clicking here, in turn inspired the comic book Œdipeland, published by Gérard Cohen-Zardi at Éditions POLE.
