Raymond Smullyan was not just an incredible mathematician and concoctor of riddles and puzzles. In fact, he started his career as a magician, performing under the stage names of Raymond Merrill and Five-Ace Merrill. His childhood and adolescence were shaped by the depression and his parents' immigrant experience, and though he dropped out of high school and had only ever audited college classes, he ended up teaching mathematics at Dartmouth without ever having received a university degree.

Once he was ensconced in academia, his degrees came quickly, receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago (partly thanks to credits he had taught at Dartmouth), and his PhD from Princeton University. Throughout his career he published widely and worked at many different universities, writing extensively on both mathematics and philosophy, the intersection of which is his interest in riddles and puzzles. Many Smullyan's works published during this time were intended to, through creativity, make accessible the problems he was tackling in his academic work.

In his later years, Smullyan refocused on music, and most especially piano, and continued his interest in performing magic. But he continued to publish into his eighties and nineties- in his last seventeen years of life, he published fifteen books!

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