Tangled Tale

This is Lewis Carroll at his most delightfully devious. Best known for Alice's adventures in Wonderland, Carroll spent twenty-seven years as a mathematics lecturer at Oxford, and in this collected volume, his two worlds collide. "A Tangled Tale" presents ten narrative puzzles, each called a "knot," where mathematical problems hide inside wry little stories. First published in The Monthly Packet magazine between 1880 and 1885, these puzzles invited readers to wrestle with questions of probability, geometry, and logic before the solutions were revealed in subsequent issues. The effect is something like eavesdropping on a Victorian puzzle club, complete with Carroll's characteristic wit and gentle absurdity. Each knot tells a small story with characters and situations, but the real game lies in untangling the mathematical thread beneath the surface. For readers who loved the logic games in Alice or who simply enjoy watching a brilliant mind play, these tales offer a singular pleasure: the joy of being cleverly tricked into thinking hard.