From the bestselling author of Alex's Adventures in Numberland and Can You Solve My Problems? comes a fascinating, hugely entertaining collection of puzzles for crossword addicts and language-lovers of all stripes.

Can you decipher the code of a long-lost civilization? Or solve riddles in runes? Or will you get lost in translation?

Crossing continents and borders, bestselling puzzle author Alex Bellos has gathered more than one hundred of the world’s best conundrums that celebrate the rich diversity of human language and culture, all while testing your deduction, intuition and street smarts.

Are you smarter than a Singaporean ten-year-old? Can you beat Sherlock Holmes? If you think the answer is yes - I challenge you to solve my problems. Here are 125 of the world's best brainteasers from the last two millennia, taking us from ancient China to medieval Europe, Victorian England to modern-day Japan, with stories of espionage, mathematical breakthroughs and puzzling rivalries along the way. Pit your wits against logic puzzles and kinship riddles, pangrams and river-crossing conundrums. Some solutions rely on a touch of cunning, others call for creativity, others need mercilessly logical thought. Some can only be solved be 2 per cent of the population. All are guaranteed to sharpen your mind. Let's get puzzling!

Football School Terrific Teams is part of the bestselling Football School series, which teaches you about the world through football, packed with superstar stories, fun facts and laugh-out-loud illustrations. Perfect for readers 7+ and recommended by the National Literacy Trust, BookTrust, the Premier League and parents and teachers. Discover the incredible true stories behind the most famous clubs in history. Find out the stories behind the most legendary clubs in football history, such as Manchester United, Real Madrid and Liverpool. Explore how these teams have overcome failure and tragedy to win leagues and lift trophies and enter the record books. Also discover fascinating facts about more unknown clubs, including the German team with skull and crossbones logo and the most eco-friendly club in the world. Perfect for fans of Football School: Star Players and Football School: Epic Heroes, this collection of fifty true stories is a must-read for any young football fan. "We love this book series!" Match of the Day Weekly "Intelligent, inspiring, funny" Head of Education, Premier League Collect the series! Football School Season 1 -4 Star Players Epic Heroes Football School Terrific Teams 20 Fantastic Football Stories The Amazing Quiz Book The Incredible Joke Book The Ultimate Puzzle Book The Greatest Ever Quiz Book - out in 2022!

Football School Epic Heroes is part of the bestselling Football School series, which teaches you about the world through football, packed with superstar stories, fun facts and laugh-out-loud illustrations. Perfect for readers 7+ and recommended by the National Literacy Trust, BookTrust, the Premier League and parents and teachers Celebrate the greatest names and teams in football history with this collection of 50 true stories. Discover the greatest football moments of all time in this collection of 50 exciting stories, perfect for fans of Football School: Star Players. Discover the incredible stories of heroes such as Messi, Ronaldo, Klopp and Rapinoe, but also the tales of the dog that helped win the league for his team and the team who won the championship with the very final kick of the game. Bringing together the best names in the game with some truly weird, wonderful and hilarious occurrences, this book is a must-read for any young football fan. “We love this book series!” Match of the Day Weekly “Intelligent, inspiring, funny” Head of Education, Premier League Collect the series! Football School Season 1­–4 Star Players Epic Heroes Football School Terrific Teams 20 Fantastic Football Stories The Amazing Quiz Book The Incredible Joke Book The Ultimate Puzzle Book The Greatest Ever Quiz Book – out in 2022!

A groundbreaking new series from two bestselling writers that teaches you about the world through football. The first book is packed with awesome true stories, real science and fascinating facts and will make you laugh loads. When do footballers poo? Can you play football on Mars? What is a magic sponge? You will find the answers to these questions and more in chapters on subjects such as history, geography, biology and maths. Illustrated throughout with hilarious cartoons and filled with laugh-out-loud gags this is the perfect book for any boy or girl who loves football. Your coaches at Football School, Alex Bellos and Ben Lyttleton, are journalists, broadcasters and award-winning science and sports writers. Their knowledge, enthusiasm and engaging writing make them the perfect team to teach you how to score with your head.

A 'mathemagical' colouring book, with 60 patterns to colour and 10 more that YOU create! For those who ponder the most intriguing questions in maths, the realm of numbers is not only visual but also beautiful. What does a sphere look like in four dimensions? How can a knight on a chessboard visit every square? And can a five-sided tile cover an infinite floor? Visions of Numberland unlocks the world's greatest mathematical mysteries, with 60 patterns to colour in and 10 more that you can create from scratch. The friendly explanations next to each pattern unlock the secrets of an intellectual quest that has been underway for three thousand years - but no maths knowledge is required. Anyone can be an artist in Numberland!

Test your football knowledge with over 300 funny and fascinating questions about the beautiful game. How much do you know about football - and the world? Test yourself and your friends with over 300 brain-busting questions from Football School. Discover questions on star strikers, crafty coaches, momentous matches and much, much more. Packed with hilarious cartoons and fascinating trivia, this spin-off from the bestselling series is the perfect way for fans to learn more about the beautiful game.

From the Guardian's very own puzzle master, Puzzle Ninja is a new collection following the bestselling Can You Solve My Problems? The puzzle masters of Japan create the world's most satisfying puzzles. Each has a distinctive style but what unites them is their megawatt brains and the beauty of their hand-crafted puzzles, which will challenge and sharpen the mind. Alex Bellos has collected over 200 of their most ingenious puzzles, rated easy to excruciating, and introduces over twenty new types of addictive problems to solve. Can you beat the puzzle masters to become a puzzle ninja?

Football School Star Players is part of the bestselling Football School series, which teaches you about the world through football, packed with superstar stories, fun facts and laugh-out-loud illustrations. Perfect for readers 7+ and recommended by the National Literacy Trust, BookTrust, the Premier League and parents and teachers. Get young fans dreaming big with this incredible collection of inspirational lives from the world of football. What made Pele the greatest player of all time? How did Harry Kane overcome the odds to win the Golden Boot? What is the secret behind Lionel Messi's outstanding success? And why is Megan Rapinoe so fearless in her beliefs? This collection of fifty biographies brings together the incredible true stories of the game's greatest legends who changed the world of football. Empowering and inspirational, this is the perfect book to get young fans dreaming big both on and off the pitch. "We love this book series!" Match of the Day Weekly "Intelligent, inspiring, funny" Head of Education, Premier League Collect the series! Football School Season 1 -4 Star Players Epic Heroes Football School Terrific Teams 20 Fantastic Football Stories The Amazing Quiz Book The Incredible Joke Book The Ultimate Puzzle Book The Greatest Ever Quiz Book - out in 2022!

A tenth anniversary edition of the iconic book about the wonderful world of maths Sunday Times bestseller | Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize The world of maths can seem mind-boggling, irrelevant and, let's face it, boring. This groundbreaking book reclaims maths from the geeks. Mathematical ideas underpin just about everything in our lives: from the surprising geometry of the 50p piece to how probability can help you win in any casino. In search of weird and wonderful mathematical phenomena, Alex Bellos travels across the globe and meets the world's fastest mental calculators in Germany and a startlingly numerate chimpanzee in Japan. Packed with fascinating, eye-opening anecdotes, Alex's Adventures in Numberland is an exhilarating cocktail of history, reportage and mathematical proofs that will leave you awestruck. This anniversary edition is fully revised and updated.

A fun and essential guide to the world of football and an incredible gift for young fans. Discover everything you've EVER wanted to know about football, from fascinating facts about your favourite players and clubs, to incredible international stats and terrific trivia. Packed with hilarious illustrations, this encyclopedia is anything but boring! Learn about all aspects of the game, including the positions, rules, mascots, nicknames, trophies and tournaments and laugh loads along the way. Brought to you by the bestselling creators of the Football School series, this book is a joyful celebration of the beautiful game.

At Soccer School, every lesson revolves around one thing: soccer!

Coaches (and authors) Alex Bellos and Ben Lyttleton cleverly use the lens of soccer to immerse kids in math, geography, biology, and more. Loaded with awesome true stories and science, the first book in the Soccer School series is illustrated throughout with cartoons that will have young soccer fans laughing out loud. Quizzes at the end of each chapter keep readers on their toes as they learn some truly weird trivia, like the hidden meaning behind a team's uniform colors, how you might play soccer on Mars, or even the most opportune time for players to go to the bathroom. Entertaining and informative, this book is sure to score a goal with soccer fanatics everywhere (when they're not on the field, of course).

Football School Season 4 is part of the bestselling Football School series, which teaches you about the world through football, packed with superstar stories, fun facts and laugh-out-loud illustrations. Perfect for readers 7+ and recommended by the National Literacy Trust, BookTrust, the Premier League and parents and teachers. This book is packed with awesome true stories, real science and fascinating facts and will make you laugh loads - and it's all about football! Discover when robots play football, where the highest ever football match took place, how referees keep time in matches and what llamas and professional footballers have in common. With hilarious illustrations throughout and laugh-out-loud gags, this is the perfect book for football-mad children everywhere. "We love this book series!" Match of the Day Weekly "Intelligent, inspiring, funny" Head of Education, Premier League Collect the series! Football School Season 1 -4 Star Players Epic Heroes Football School Terrific Teams 20 Fantastic Football Stories The Amazing Quiz Book The Incredible Joke Book The Ultimate Puzzle Book The Greatest Ever Quiz Book - out in 2022!

Football School Season 3 is part of the bestselling Football School series, which teaches you about the world through football, packed with superstar stories, fun facts and laugh-out-loud illustrations. Perfect for readers 7+ and recommended by the National Literacy Trust, BookTrust, the Premier League and parents and teachers. This book is packed with awesome true stories, real science and fascinating facts and will make you laugh loads - and it's all about football. Learn the maths behind the coin toss, how a good night's sleep helps you perform better on the pitch, the history of trophies, the biology of the foot and about animal mascots from around the world. Illustrated throughout with hilarious cartoons and filled with laugh-out-loud gags this is the perfect book for any boy or girl who loves football. "We love this book series!" Match of the Day Weekly "Intelligent, inspiring, funny" Head of Education, Premier League Collect the series! Football School Season 1 -4 Star Players Epic Heroes Football School Terrific Teams 20 Fantastic Football Stories The Amazing Quiz Book The Incredible Joke Book The Ultimate Puzzle Book The Greatest Ever Quiz Book - out in 2022!

The second book in the groundbreaking new series from two bestselling writers that teaches you about the world through football. This book is packed with awesome true stories, real science and fascinating facts and will make you laugh loads - and it's all about football. What is a vomitory? When do footballers wee? Where do goalkeepers let in chickens? When did women start playing football? You'll find the answers to these questions and more in chapters on subjects such as biology, maths and history. Illustrated throughout with hilarious cartoons and filled with laugh-out-loud gags this is the perfect book for any boy or girl who loves football.

Football School Season 4 is part of the bestselling Football School series, which teaches you about the world through football, packed with superstar stories, fun facts and laugh-out-loud illustrations. Perfect for readers 7+ and recommended by the National Literacy Trust, BookTrust, the Premier League and parents and teachers. This book is packed with awesome true stories, real science and fascinating facts and will make you laugh loads - and it's all about football! Discover when robots play football, where the highest ever football match took place, how referees keep time in matches and what llamas and professional footballers have in common. With hilarious illustrations throughout and laugh-out-loud gags, this is the perfect book for football-mad children everywhere. "We love this book series!" Match of the Day Weekly "Intelligent, inspiring, funny" Head of Education, Premier League Collect the series! Football School Season 1 -4 Star Players Epic Heroes Football School Terrific Teams 20 Fantastic Football Stories The Amazing Quiz Book The Incredible Joke Book The Ultimate Puzzle Book The Greatest Ever Quiz Book - out in 2022!

Thought you had it bad? In this book, you will be: Imprisoned by a sadistic logician. Challenged to raise dogs from the dead. Trapped on a burning island. And much more besides . . . Everything is at stake in this compendium of more than 150 ingenious puzzles, selected to reveal the wonderful diversity of brainteasers that have confounded and intrigued solvers for the last thousand years. You'll need to pit your wits against probability problems, wrestle with wordplay, grapple with geometry and scrabble for survival. Along the way you will discover stories of whip-smart thinkers, eccentric novelists and a poodle with allegedly supernatural powers. You will absorb fascinating and important mathematical ideas. Some solutions will rely on ingenuity, some will challenge you to spot hidden patterns, others call for extreme rationality. All will surprise, entertain and stretch your brain. Will you make it out with your puzzling pride intact?

From triangles, rotations and power laws, to fractals, cones and curves, bestselling author Alex Bellos takes you on a journey of mathematical discovery with his signature wit, engaging stories and limitless enthusiasm. As he narrates a series of eye-opening encounters with lively personalities all over the world, Alex demonstrates how numbers have come to be our friends, are fascinating and extremely accessible, and how they have changed our world. He turns even the dreaded calculus into an easy-to-grasp mathematical exposition, and sifts through over 30,000 survey submissions to reveal the world's favourite number. In Germany, he meets the engineer who designed the first roller-coaster loop, whilst in India he joins the world's highly numerate community at the International Congress of Mathematicians. He explores the wonders behind the Game of Life program, and explains mathematical logic, growth and negative numbers. Stateside, he hangs out with a private detective in Oregon and meets the mathematician who looks for universes from his garage in Illinois. Read this captivating book, and you won't realise that you're learning about complex concepts. Alex will get you hooked on maths as he delves deep into humankind's turbulent relationship with numbers, and proves just how much fun we can have with them.

Too often math gets a bad rap, characterized as dry and difficult. But, Alex Bellos says, "math can be inspiring and brilliantly creative. Mathematical thought is one of the great achievements of the human race, and arguably the foundation of all human progress. The world of mathematics is a remarkable place."
Bellos has traveled all around the globe and has plunged into history to uncover fascinating stories of mathematical achievement, from the breakthroughs of Euclid, the greatest mathematician of all time, to the creations of the Zen master of origami, one of the hottest areas of mathematical work today. Taking us into the wilds of the Amazon, he tells the story of a tribe there who can count only to five and reports on the latest findings about the math instinct--including the revelation that ants can actually count how many steps they've taken. Journeying to the Bay of Bengal, he interviews a Hindu sage about the brilliant mathematical insights of the Buddha, while in Japan he visits the godfather of Sudoku and introduces the brainteasing delights of mathematical games.
Exploring the mysteries of randomness, he explains why it is impossible for our iPods to truly randomly select songs. In probing the many intrigues of that most beloved of numbers, pi, he visits with two brothers so obsessed with the elusive number that they built a supercomputer in their Manhattan apartment to study it. Throughout, the journey is enhanced with a wealth of intriguing illustrations, such as of the clever puzzles known as tangrams and the crochet creation of an American math professor who suddenly realized one day that she could knit a representation of higher dimensional space that no one had been able to visualize.
Whether writing about how algebra solved Swedish traffic problems, visiting the Mental Calculation World Cup to disclose the secrets of lightning calculation, or exploring the links between pineapples and beautiful teeth, Bellos is a wonderfully engaging guide who never fails to delight even as he edifies. "Here's Looking at Euclid "is a rare gem that brings the beauty of math to life.

Football School Season 3 is part of the bestselling Football School series, which teaches you about the world through football, packed with superstar stories, fun facts and laugh-out-loud illustrations. Perfect for readers 7+ and recommended by the National Literacy Trust, BookTrust, the Premier League and parents and teachers. This book is packed with awesome true stories, real science and fascinating facts and will make you laugh loads - and it's all about football. What colour are Cristiano Ronaldo's pyjamas? How many bones are there in the human foot? And why is that dodo alive and kicking? The third book in the bestselling series teaches children about history, maths, geography and biology through football, facts and fun. With side-splitting cartoons and multiple choice quizzes, this is the perfect book for anyone who loves football. "We love this book series!" Match of the Day Weekly "Intelligent, inspiring, funny" Head of Education, Premier League Collect the series! Football School Season 1 -4 Star Players Epic Heroes Football School Terrific Teams 20 Fantastic Football Stories The Amazing Quiz Book The Incredible Joke Book The Ultimate Puzzle Book The Greatest Ever Quiz Book - out in 2022!

The second book in the groundbreaking new series from two bestselling writers that teaches you about the world through football.This book is packed with awesome true stories, real science and fascinating facts and will make you laugh loads - and it's all about football. What is a vomitory? When do footballers wee? Where do goalkeepers let in chickens? When did women start playing football? You'll find the answers to these questions and more in chapters on subjects such as biology, maths and history. Illustrated throughout with hilarious cartoons and filled with laugh-out-loud gags this is the perfect book for any boy or girl who loves football.