Jerry Butters has a BA in mathematics from Oberlin College, and an MS in mathematics and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. He taught mathematics for two years at Mindanao State University in the Philippines as a Peace Corps volunteer. He taught economics for five years at Princeton University. For most of his career, he worked on consumer protection cases and policy issues at the Federal Trade Commission. In his retirement, he has become a piano teacher and performer. He enjoys hobbies ranging from reading Chinese to practicing Taiji. This book is an outgrowth of another of his hobbies - his love of designing and solving puzzles of all sorts. Jim Henle has a BA in mathematics from Dartmouth College and a PhD from M.I.T. He taught for two years at U. P. Baguio in the Philippines as a Peace Corps volunteer, two years at a middle school as alternative service, and 42 years at Smith College. His research is primarily in logic and set theory, with additional papers in geometry, graph theory, number theory, games, economics, and music. He edited columns for The Mathematical Intelligencer. He authored or co-authored five books. His most recent book, The Proof and the Pudding, compares mathematics and gastronomy. He has collaborated with Jerry on puzzle papers and chamber music concerts.
"" Butters and Henle have devised a series of “retrograde analysis” baseball puzzles, meaning puzzles whose goal is to discover something about the history of a baseball game given information about how things turned out in the end. Some of their puzzles involve analyzing newspaper box scores from actual games. This is one of the most creative puzzle books I have seen in years. "" – Jason Rosenhouse, Games World of Puzzles Magazine