An engrossing primer on sudoku as seen from the creator’s side.
Readers tired of solving sudoku puzzles can try creating them with this fun debut how-to manual.
Zheng’s doctoral research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2011 involved programming computers to make sudoku puzzles. In this book, she distills the craft into step-by-step procedures that readers can use to make the familiar grids. In a sudoku game, each of the numbers one through nine appears once in each row, column, and three-by-three “box.” The author’s simple process starts with a top row of randomly arranged numbers; readers can then create subsequent rows by “shifting” numbers from the previous row in particular ways. (The procedure also allows readers to build the grid by using columns or boxes instead of rows.) Zheng then provides other rules to help readers make the grid more random. She doesn’t go into the mathematics behind her procedures; she just lays them out as a practical recipe, with lucid, illustrative examples that make the process so easy that complete novices will be able to make sudoku grids in a few minutes. Then comes the hard part—figuring out which squares to erase so that the grid becomes a challenging but still solvable puzzle. Erase too few and the puzzle is too easy; erase too many and it lacks a single, unique solution. To that end, Zheng prescribes methods for deciding which squares to omit, using two elementary tests to determine whether players will be able to deduce the numbers from the remaining squares. The author notes that the procedure amounts to solving the puzzle in reverse. Creating a puzzle is therefore as difficult as solving one, perhaps more so, because there’s no gratifying endpoint—one simply erases squares until the puzzle becomes hard to figure out. Thus, while sudoku-solving climaxes in a triumphant solution, sudoku-making simply grinds to a halt. Still, Zheng’s guide offers readers a vigorous mental workout.
An engrossing primer on sudoku as seen from the creator’s side.Pub Date: June 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9962042-0-0
Page Count: 132
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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