You can't beat the odds; Magical mathematics: The integers; How old is the captain?; Vertiginously large prime numbers; Loss plus loss equals win; When it comes to large numbers, intuition fails; The key for encryption is the telephone book; The village barber who shaves himself; Quit while you're ahead?; Can a monkey create great literature?; The birthday paradox; Horror vacui; Sufficient difficulties with the logic of mathematics are in fact a necessity; To change or not to change? The Monty Hall problem; In Hilbert's Hotel there is always a vacancy; That fascinating number pi; How random events become calculable quantities; A one-million-dollar prize: How are the prime numbers distributed?; The five-dimensional cake; One night stand; Fly me to the Moon; Using residues; Top secret!; Magical mathematics: Order amidst chaos; How does one approach genius?; On semitones and twelfth roots; Why am I always standing in the wrong line?; Zero: An undeservedly underrated number; I love to count!; Genius autodidact: The Indian mathematician Ramanujan; I hate mathematics because.; The traveling salesman: A modern odyssey; Squaring the circle; A step into the infinite; Mathematics in your CD player; The logarithm: A dying breed; Prizeworthy mathematics; Why axioms of all things?; Proof by computer?; The lottery: The small prizes; Formulas = concentrated thought; Endless growth; How do quanta compute?; Extremes!; Infinitely small?; Mathematical observations at the fire department; The first mathematical proof is 2,500 years old; There is transcendence in mathematics, though it has nothing to do with mysticism; Is every even number the sum of two primes?; Why we invert conditional probabilities incorrectly; Millionaire or billionaire?; Mathematics and chess; ''The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics''; The search for Mersenne primes; Berlin, eighteenth century: A beatuful formula is discovered; The first really complicated number; P = NP: In mathematics, is luck sometimes unnecessary?; Happy 32nd birthday!; Buffon's needle; Running hot and cold: Controlled cooling solves optimization problems; Who didn't pay?; What can statistics tell us?; Arbitrage; Farewell to risk: Options; Is mathematics a reflection of the world?; Mathematics that you can hear; Chance as composer; Do dice have a guilty conscience?; Strawberry ice cream can kill you!; Prosperity for all; No risk, thank you!; A Nobel Prize in mathematics?; Chance as reckoner: Monte Carlo methods; Fuzzy logic; Secret messages in the Bible?; How knotted can a knot be?; How much mathematics does a person need?; Big, bigger, biggest; It is probably correct; Is the world a crooked place?; Is there a mathematical bureau of standards?; The butterfly that fluttered by; Guaranteed to make you rich; Don't trust anyone over thirty; Equality in mathematics; Magical invariants; Mathematics goes to the movies; The lazy eight: Infinity; Books need bigger margins!; Visualizing internal organs with mathematics; A brain in the computer; Cogito, ergo sum; Does the world have a hole?; Complex numbers are not so complex as their name suggests; M. C. Escher and infinity; A one at the beginning is much more likely than a two; The Leipzig town hall and the sunflower; Information optimally packaged; Four colors suffice!; Mathematics makes billionaires; Further reading; Index.