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I am trying to find the name of this mathematical book, a smart student at my university gave a lecture about it a long time ago, and all I can remember of the talk was

  • it was about mathematics
  • it had birds
  • one of the birds had the name KY.

I have tried google to find the title or author; however, searching with KY doesn't result in any thing mathematical.

I am asking here because someone here should know the Title of the book.

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    @aaa: You should post that as an answer (when the question is reopened). Frankly though, if I hadn't been told about it a few weeks ago I would never have guessed the question had anything to do with combinatory logic.2012-01-28

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The book name is "To Mock a Mockingbird and Other Logic Puzzles: Including an Amazing Adventure in Combinatory Logic" by Raymond Smullyan.

A certain enchanted forest is inhabited by talking birds. Given any birds A and B, if you call out the name of B to A, then A will respond by calling out the name of some bird to you; this bird we designate AB. Thus AB is the bird named by A upon hearing the name of B.

In the beginning, there is about hundred pages with unrelated logic puzzles and the rest of the book (about 200 pages) is about a policeman exploring different forests populated with different combinatory logic birds.

For example, Mockingbird is a combinator M defined

M x = x x 

Bluebird is

B x y z = x (y z) 

and so on ;-)

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    There is even a scientific paper that can be found through scholar.google.com that uses this terminology.2014-03-20