Alex Bellos‘s two books, Alex’s Adventures in Numberland and Alex Through the Looking-Glass are both superb, as is Matt Parker‘s book, Things to Make and do in the Fourth Dimension.

Evelyn Lamb said that she read Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid at around the same age as David’s cousin. While it’s certainly got lots of inspiring maths in it, to do with logic and the mathematical way of thinking, I have to say it’s a hard slog. The association of 666 with evil originates from a passage in the Book of Revelations in the New Testament of the Bible. As it reads in the King James Version (13:18):Belcastro, Sarah-Marie and Howard, Aaron, ‘The Devil is in the Culture’, Math Horizon, 10:2 (2002), 16-20.

There are a lot of great recommendations here for math lovers. Does anyone has similar suggestions for science lovers? Perhaps something like John Casti’s Paradigms Lost, but more recent and perhaps slightly less dry? Reply

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a b Deborah Loewenberg Ball and Hyman Bass (January 2000). "The Number Devil book review" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 47 (1): 51–56 . Retrieved 3 September 2011.