Explains in simple terms how to encode and decode messages in various ciphers, describes coding machines, and gives formulas for invisible ink.

It's a warm summer's afternoon when young Alice first tumbles down the rabbit hole and into the adventures in Wonderland that have kept readers spellbound for more than 150 years. Collected here are Lewis Carroll's two classics - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass - in which Alice encounters the laconic Cheshire Cat, the anxious White Rabbit and the terrifying Red Queen, as well as a host of other outlandish and charming...

Contains riddles and puzzles on a variety of mathematical topics to challenge and entertain the reader.

"More than any of his other writing, Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American cemented his reputation as America's premier writer on recreational mathematics and set the standard for the genre. The Last Recreations collects Gardner's columns from the last seven years before his retirement from the magazine in 1986. As always in his published collections, Gardner includes letters received from readers commenting on the ideas...

"Martin Gardner is perhaps the wittiest, most devastating unmasker of scientific fraud and intellectual chicanery of our time. Here he muses on topics as diverse as numerology, New Age anthropology, and the late Senator Claiborne Pell's obsession with UFOs, as he mines Americans' seemingly inexhaustible appetite for bad science. Gardner's funny, brilliantly unsettling exposés of reflexology and urine therapy should be required reading for anyone...