Text File

Acornell.2741 net.math utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!floyd!vax135!cornell!jts Sun Apr 11 22:55:46 1982 Book on Paradoxes For those of you interested in a book of paradoxes, try "Vicious Circles and Infinity", by Patrick Hughes and George Brecht (Penguin books).

Among the paradoxes it includes are:

. Russell's paradox (the set of sets not members of themselves) . Berry's paradox (the least integer not nameable in less than 19 syllables) . Zeno's paradoxes (Achilles and the tortise, the arrow, etc.) . Hilbert's hotel (has an countably infinite number of rooms)

It also has some cute stories; here's my favorite:

The following entry won a newspaper prize for the best piece on the topic "What would you most like to read on opening the morning mail?"

Our Second Competition

The First Prize in the second of this year's competitions goes to Mr. Arthur Robinson, whose witty entry was easily the best of those we received. His choice of what he would like to read on opening his paper was headed 'Our Second Competition' and was as follows:

"The First prize in the second of this year's competitions goes to Mr. Arthur Robinson, whose witty entry was easily the best of those we received. His choice of what he would like to read on opening his paper was headed 'Our Second Competition,' but owing to paper restrictions, we cannot print all of it."

----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/

This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:

1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.

2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:

The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.