Among them was Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman, the Russian mathematician (unrelated to the author), who solved the Poincaré conjecture, and who was awarded and rejected the Fields Medal. Grigori’s father, an electrical engineer, gave him Physics for Entertainment to encourage his son’s interest in mathematics. In the foreword, the book’s author describes the contents as conundrums, brain-teasers, entertaining anecdotes, and unexpected comparisons, adding, I have quoted extensively from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain and other writers, because, besides providing entertainment, the fantastic experiments these writers describe may well serve as instructive illustrations at physics classes. The book’s topics included how to jump from a moving car, and why, according to the law of buoyancy, we would never drown in the Dead Sea. Ideas from this book are still used by science teachers today.

    Its aim is to deduce all the fundamental propositions of logic and mathematics from a small number of logical premises and primitive ideas, establishing that mathematics is a development of logic. This abridged text of Volume I contains the material that is most relevant to an introductory study of logic and the philosophy of mathematics (more advanced students will of course wish to refer to the complete edition). It contains the whole of the preliminary sections (which present the authors' justification of the philosophical standpoint adopted at the outset of their work); the whole of Part I (in which the logical properties of propositions, propositional functions, classes and relations are established); section A of Part II (dealing with unit classes and couples); and Appendices A and C (which give further developments of the argument on the theory of deduction and truth functions).