Henry Ernest Dudeney was England's greatest inventor of puzzles;
indeed, he may well have been the greatest puzzlist who ever lived.
Today there is scarcely a single puzzle book that does not contain
(often without credit) dozens of brilliant mathematical problems that
had their origin in Dudeney's fertile imagination.
He was born in the village of Mayfield in 1857. Thus he was sixteen
years younger than Sam Loyd, the American
puzzle genius. In the 1890s they collaborated on a series of puzzle
articles for the magazineTit-Bits, and later they arranged to exchange
puzzles for their magazine and newspaper columns. This may explain the
large amount of duplication in the published writings of Loyd and Dudeney.
Of the two, Dudeney was probably the better mathematician. Loyd excelled
in catching the public fancy with manufactured toys and advertising novelties.
Dudeney's work was mathematically more sophisticated. Like Loyd he enjoyed
clothing his problems with amusing anecdotes.
Dudeney's first book, "The Canterbury Puzzles", was published in 1907.
Martin Gardner
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