The book's title is "A Passion for Mathematics: Numbers, Puzzles, Madness, Religion, and the Quest for Reality" is very accurate.<br>This is not a text book where you must to read page n-1 in order to understand page n. It is more like the Guinness Book of Records which you can open on any page and find something fascinating.<br>I found this book in our local library, but already after a couple of days I knew that I wanted this book. This was the only book I took with me on my recent trip overseas, and now it lying around in the kitchen and as I look into it at my leisure I find most fascinating anecdotes and problems.<br>Right from the onset the book captured me with the story of Ramanujan, a barefooted South Indian young man writing to a famous English mathematician. The mathematician (Hardy) first looked at it and threw the letter in the garbage, but then later took it out of, read it again and realized that the author must be a rare genius. Ramanujan was invited to England where he continue stunning his contemporaries with most unusual original discoveries. No mathematicians could follow Ramanujan's reasoning, but could see that his formulas were correct. Ramanujan himself explained that he received his formulas from an Indian Goddess while he was sleeping!<br><br>If you have a few mathematical programs such as Excel, Graph, Mathematica, or GSP, you can check out many of the problems, play with them, change them around or produces some pretty pictures like for example the "Schmidhuber Circles" on page 206.<br><br>The book does not require any deep knowledge of mathematics. This book can be equally enjoyed by highschool kids and university graduates.<br><br>Please don't believe me, check it out: The chances are that you will love it.