author : Julian Havil

Many mathematical results are very counterintuitive, so they seem paradoxical. Here, Havil presents some of the simpler ones, and goes through the maths to show that they are true. About half of them are probability or statistical paradoxes, the rest range over geometric and numerical cases.

There is some fun stuff in here I hadn't come across before, and some old chestnuts. I would have preferred, especially in the probability cases, a bit more on getting an intuitive feel for why these results are true, in addition to the mathematical demonstrations that they are true. But that aside, there is much here to amuse and inform.