Twelve essays take a playful approach to mathematics, investigating the topology of a blanket, the odds of beating a superior tennis player, and how to distinguish between fact and fallacy.

1. Mother Worm's Blanket
2. The Drunken Tennis-Player
3. The Infinormatics Laboratory
4. The Autovoracious Ourotorus
5. Fallacy or Ycallaf?
6. Build Your Own Virus
7. Parity Piece
8. Close Encounters of the Fermat Kind
9. Pascal's Fractals
10. The Worm Returns
11. All Parallels Lead to Rome
12. The Twelve Games of Christmas

Author of Concepts of Modern Mathematics and Another Fine Math You've Got Me Into..., Ian Stewart is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick (UK).