Couple of years back I came to know about Peter Winkler, a mathematics professor, most likely when I came across this piece by him "Seven Puzzles You Think You Must Not Have Heard Correctly".
This contains Seven really nice puzzles with solutions most of which thought I had heard previosuly but there was one especially interesting and which turned out to be one of the toughest puzzle I have ever solved.
After that I came to know of couple of books that he has written on puzzles.
1. Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection
2. Mathematical Mind-Benders
Unfortunately they are not available in indian editions, but luckily a large number of pages of the first book are on view at both amazon and books.google.com. It is certainly a treasure trove for puzzle seekers like me. It contains some of the most amazing puzzles you would have come across. He also gives a personal perspective to most puzzles, by explaining in the solutions, how he came across the puzzle. I really enjoy reading those parts too. But for the sheer quality of the puzzle this book is unbeatable and the puzzle are neatly divided into various sections like Algorithms, Geometry, Probability and so on. I would highly recommend it.
Some days back a friend pointed me to another paper by winkler, "Five algorithmic puzzles".
This as the name says contains 5 puzzles all of which have a common theme, which is that you are given a process, such as breaking a chocolate bar along a boundary iteratively, and you have to prove that the process will end in finite steps and it will end in specific configuration . To solve these you will have to find some property which either increases / decreases in the process and it has a bound beyond which it cannot go. These are again really tough puzzles and accompanied with solutions and winklers interesting notes.
Anyone interested in other recreational mathematics / puzzle writings will do good to read stuff by these people:
1. Martin Gardner (Highly Recommended): Perhaps the first person to write so extensively about puzzles and recreational mathematics. Immensely interesting and readable.
2. Raymond Smullyan: Mostly writes about Logical puzzles and interesting stuff in Mathematical Logic.
3. Ian Stewart: I dont think he is into puzzles but he writes about complex but interesting mathematical topics and makes them easy to understand and exciting. After reading his books you would want to be a mathematician!!
Again if you go to Google Books, you will find some of the works by these guys (Not Smullyan) are available for limited preview.
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