Solving equations often involves taking square roots of numbers and if you're not careful you might accidentally take a square root of something that's negative. That isn't allowed of course, but if you hold your breath and just carry on, then you might eventually square the illegal entity again and end up with a negative number that's a perfectly valid solution to your equation.

Sequences of numbers can have limits. For example, the sequence 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, ... has the limit 0 and the sequence 0, 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, ... has the limit 1. But not all number sequences behave so nicely. Can we still discern some sort of limiting behaviour?

How would you go about adding up all the integers from 1 to 100? Tap them into a calculator? Write a little computer code? Or look up the general formula for summing integers?

Sometimes you just can't argue with the evidence. If a large sample of
very ill people got better after dancing naked at full moon, then surely
the dance works. But hang on a second. Before you jump to conclusions, you need to rule
out a statistical phenomenon called regression to the mean.

The dome of St Paul's, rising elegantly above London since the cathedral was rebuilt late in the seventeenth century, hides an intriguing early example of the interplay between maths and architecture.