This course teaches us how to do math for our own amusement with puzzles, tricks, and games.

Humans have used math to entertain and baffle each other for millenia.

The ancient Greek mathematician Diophantus of Alexandria is said to have written his own epitaph as a math puzzle, while tic-tac-toe boards have been discovered carved into Roman artifacts.

Dr. Yossi Elran is a recreational mathematician and metagrobologist, someone who studies puzzles.

In this course from the Davidson Institute of Science Education at the Weizmann Institute of Science, presented through FutureLearn, Elran uses logic problems and mathematical games to introduce the idea of doing math for fun.

An Introduction to Recreational Math covers the lives of influential recreational mathematicians, while presenting entertaining mathematical magic tricks and encouraging students to try some out for themselves.