Michael Sewell is Emeritus Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Reading. He has B.Sc., Ph.D, and D.Sc. degrees from Nottingham University and is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and of the Royal Meteorological Society. During the decade starting in 2001, he devised and delivered weekly "Mathematics Masterclasses" to selected groups of able ten-year-olds at Bisham School near Maidenhead, which followed on from the 1997 OUP edited work "Mathematics Masterclasses - Stretching the Imagination", and led to this current book.