Alex's Adventures in Numberland, By Alex Bellos

Suddenly it all adds up...

This marvellous book explodes the myths that maths is boring and hard.

Alex Bellos writes of probability and gambling, the magic of pi, Rubik's cubes, slide rules, Sudoku, algebra, abacuses, bell curves, the geometry of the 50p piece, squaring the circle (don't bother trying), the Sierpinski carpet and the Menger sponge, origami, number sequences, the spiral of a peregrine falcon's swoop, randomness and infinity.

For the first time in my life I ... well, I wouldn't say understand, but sort of get the idea of non-Euclidean geometry. Bellos's explanations are so lucid that you feel you could actually do this stuff. It's like watching someone run round a darkened house switching all the lights on.