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To facilitate our survival on the planet, human beings must make basic assumptions about physical reality. That's essential in practical terms if we're to maintain our existence, but for a species which craves a sense of stability and continuity, it's also a psychological imperative. We need to 'know' certain things are true. But can we? Since the days of ancient Greece, philosophers have pondered the question of whether or not it's possible for us to know what we think we know about anything. Debate on this point and those arising from it has never ceased. Neither has our common human desire to arm ourselves with 'facts', a desire which manifests clearly in our affinity for quantification. We seem to derive great comfort from representing things in numbers and/or expressing our understanding of the world through formulae. There is a sense of certainty, illusory or not, to be had in 'doing the math'. Enter Craig Conley. By means of presenting a series of simple and often hilarious math problems, his book ' Presumptive Conundrums' invites the reader to contemplate both epistemology and our species' profound relationship with numbers. Pythagoras said, "number is the within of all things." Mr. Conley is a master of showing us the within of things in a beautifully illustrated and profoundly engaging manner. 5-stars. —Natasha at Amazon
Presumptive Conundrums offers all sorts of literary, rhetorical math problems that seemingly have no serious answer or provability. It's the ultimate puzzler for logical- and mathematical-minded folks.
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You didn't need a math professor to tell you that, no matter what the song says, one is not "the loneliest number." (But if you actually do need a math professor to tell you, Dr. Mason Porter of UCLA is there for you.) The lyric needs text doctoring, since one divided by two is in fact a half (.5): Original: One is a number divided by two.
Revision: One's the remainder when you once halve two.
If we do say so ourselves, our revision offers not only homophony (one's/once) but also wordplay (halve/have). (Don't knock us, for if we received even half the literary criticism we deserve, we wouldn't have to analyze our own work. Hint: this is your invitation to be part of the solution.)
Our headline from Greensboro's 1975 yearbook.
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How can one prove the equation "Girls + Smiles = Peace"? This perplexing calculation appears in Peace College's 1981 yearbook.
The answer is simple, with matchsticks. Girls are represented by the XX chromosome, rendered with four crosscrossing matches. Smiles are represented by a smiley-face symbol comprised of four more matches. Four matches plus four matches equal the eight matches of the peace symbol.
That's what Presumptive Conundrums is all about -- literary, rhetorical math problems that seemingly have no serious answer or provability. It's the ultimate puzzler for logical- and mathematical-minded folks.
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Original Content Copyright © 2025 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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