This is a book of math­em­at­ical recreat­ions and cur­ios­it­ies inspired by the work of the late Martin Gardner. Havil, a maths teacher at Win­chester Coll­ege, claims that the sol­ut­ions to all the prob­lems and para­doxes here are sur­pris­ing, clever or both, and that under­stand­ing them requires only the math­em­at­ical abil­ity of a high-school stud­ent. While he largely succ­eeds on the first claim, to easily follow the maths you prob­ably need to be either a very recent stud­ent or have an except­ion­ally good memory.

Around half of the prob­lems them­selves are ess­ent­ially stat­ist­ical, so an int­er­est in the way that large num­bers and prob­ab­il­it­ies can trip people up is import­ant.