"Tribute to a Mathemagician" is the third book in a series of publications based on the Gathering for Gardner meetings, a regular gathering of enthusiasts who share Martin Gardner's interests in mathematics, magic and puzzle creation. Martin Gardner, the father of recreational mathematics, has influenced readers all over the world with his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American, which ran for 25 years.

It's never easy for me to read a work of fiction based in and around a world I'm familiar with. Quite often I find that the author will make some small error of fact, perhaps about something very minor, which then stops me from enjoying the book as a whole because I begin to wonder what other facts, in areas that I know nothing about, are also incorrect.

This book is a curious mixture of biography, history and mathematics, all neatly packaged into an entertaining and enlightening read. In essence it is a biography of the brilliant and eccentric mathematician, John von Neumann, who began life, much like many of the other great mathematicians, by being able to do basic arithmatic before other children could speak and with an ability to calculate exceptionally well before he even went to school.

Measurement is a tricky business, and rarely leaves the thing measured unchanged, as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states at the quantum level. But statistician David Hand has gone back to the foundations, examining measurement right across the various disciplines: psychology, medicine, physical sciences, economics, the social sciences and elsewhere. He must treat in a unified manner scales used to measure phenomena as different as pain, retail prices and magnetism.

This charming book is in its second edition (the first was published in 1994). It is about integers, with a short section for each number between 1 and 200, and a line for each between 201 and 999. There are "boxes" for interesting facts and definitions, such as "perfect number", and a few "large numbers" also make the cut, including 1729, the subject of a famous anecdote about Hardy and Ramanujan, and 10¹⁰⁰⁰, the googol.

Infinity is more than simply the biggest ever number, and even this simple description has caused problems for mathematicians throughout the ages. From the ancient Greeks to Newton, from Newton to present-day mathematicians such as Cristian Claude and Boris Pavlov of New Zealand, infinity has posed both practical and conceptual problems.

It feels like we've always known that the universe began with a Big Bang, and like the Big Bang could never have been called anything else. But this is far from the truth, as Simon Singh explains in this overview of the state of human knowledge about the beginning of everything (or, as Calvin of "Calvin and Hobbes" preferred to call it, the Great Kablooie).

Most of us could not work without a computer, or have a good time without a CD player, and yet we know very little about the way computers work or the quantum mechanical principles behind lasers. These two subjects involve complex concepts and it is not easy to explain them in a brief book. Nevertheless, "A shortcut through time" manages to present a clear and enjoyable crash course on quantum computers, a science which lies at the intersection between quantum mechanics, computer science and mathematics.

In our day-to-day lives we all use, and are in fact dependent on, physics. For example, all of modern (and not so modern!) technology relies on our knowledge of underlying physical principles. However, physics is also one of the most commonly feared sciences, with many people put off by the complex details which have developed alongside the subject's sophistication.

Have you ever wondered how high a flea of the size of a human could jump, why rivers meander or how high a tree can grow? Mathematics in Nature provides answers to all these questions and many more, while introducing the reader to the ideas and methods of mathematical modelling.

This book from Professor Sir Michael Marmot (knighted for his services to epidemiology and understanding health inequalities) is concerned with a very simple question: why do people of higher status have better health and live longer than those of lower status?

After years of publications on popular science and mathematics, we all know that mathematics can provide answers to questions arising from everyday life. If we want to find out when the two hands of a clock will be in exactly the same position or to calculate the volume of a doughnut, we will certainly need to use some maths. But how difficult can this be?