Forget about the boring pages of textbooks. Witty and tricky problems for ingenuity and fascinating puzzles, secrets of encrypted correspondence and amazing tricks with numbers, intricate tricks of mathematical gymnastics and even short stories with a mathematical secret await you. The great popularizer of science Yakov Isidorovich Perelman will help you understand: mathematics is entertaining...

‘A fascinating, gripping story of the confrontation between the fearless young meteorologist Klimenko and the half-mad, brilliant adventurer Bailey, who has learned to liquefy air from the atmosphere and sell the resulting balls of air gas hydrate. Bailey's criminal activity leads to radical climate change. The Earth begins to lose its atmosphere. How can we stop the ‘air seller’ before he...

Lost in a new world, Lyra finds Will—a boy on the run, a murderer—a worthy and welcome ally. For this is a world where soul-eating Specters stalk the streets and witches share the skies with troops of angels. Each is searching—Lyra for the meaning of Dark Matter, Will for his missing father—but what they find instead is a deadly secret, a knife of untold power. And neither Lyra nor Will...

Daniel leads a rich life in the university town of Athens, Georgia. He’s got a couple close friends, a steady paycheck working for a regional airline, and of course, for a few glorious days each Fall, college football tailgates. He considers himself to be a mostly lucky guy-despite the fact that he’s suffered from a debilitating disease since he was a small child, one that has left him unable...

Coming from a provincial working-class family, Platonov wholeheartedly accepted the October Revolution, and the more interesting is the fact that his works convey with unprecedented force a personal ideological tragedy, unusually clearly expressed in ‘The Pit.’ The very idea of building a ‘Common Proletarian House’ turns ‘The Pit’ into a dystopia that is shocking in its power, where the details...

'There are Russian fairy tales where the hero, some kind of Ivan the Fool, stops at the crossroads of three roads. One is to the right, the other is to the left, the third is straight. If you go to the right, you will find death, if you go to the left, you will meet love, and if you go straight, the kingdom with chests full of gold. Plus a golden toilet. What to choose: death, love or wealth?...

From Athena to Alexander the Great and from Egypt to Ethiopia, author Piotr Socha explores different methods of beekeeping and uncovers the debt that humans owe this vital species. His beautiful guide for children offers full-color two-page topical entries dominated by large, detailed illustrations with text running along the lower half of the pages. Bees are essential to the health of...

Part botany, part history, part cultural anthropology—Trees goes beyond the basics to tell readers everything they might want to know about this particular branch of the plant kingdom. Trees explores the important roles trees play in our ecosystem, takes an up-close-and-personal look at the parts of trees (from roots to leaves), and unpacks the cultural impact of trees from classification...