The Unexpected Hanging Paradox
A prisoner is told he will hang next week, on a day he cannot possibly predict. He proves it cannot happen. It happens.
1943 (in circulation), 1948 (first in print)21 min read
American mathematics
Timothy Y. Chow
Mathematician, with a 1995 MIT doctorate under Richard Stanley, who has worked in combinatorics and at the Center for Communications Research. His 1998 American Mathematical Monthly survey of the surprise examination paradox is the standard map of the literature, sorting five decades of proposed solutions into a small number of genuinely distinct positions.