If you buy one book on recreational mathematics, this is the one you should buy.
The Magical Maze is for anyone who has ever wondered about how the mathematical mind works, how mathematics relates to the natural world, or how new mathematics gets done. For mathematics is a maze, a maze in your head - a maze of ideas, a maze of logic. And that maze in your mind is a powerful tool for understanding an even bigger maze - the maze of cause and effect that we call 'the universe'. That is its special kind of magic. Real magic, strange magic, infinitely fascinating magic.
In this book, specially written to accompany the 1997 Royal Institution Christmas lectures, Ian Stewart guides the reader swiftly and painlessly through the junctions and passageways of the magical maze, to reveal its beauty, its surprise and its fascination.
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