This book is full of little and bright gems for the mathematically inclined. It includes original pieces from many mathematicians and historians of mathematics but the book is not very technical and heavy on math. In the same book you can find a very interesting discussion that took place in UK parliament which is about defending a high level of math in UK schools (I admired the level of sophistication and argumentation of Mr. Tony McWalter in his 'Defense of Quadratic Equations'), a valuable piece on the economics of rare mathematics books, the description of calculus in the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1771) where the author talks about fluxions and fluents (instead of derivatives and continuous functions) and lots of other interesting pieces.

My favorite chapters are by Joseph A. Gallian (in which he uses applied math to hack personal info-to-license plate numbering schemes), Richard Guy (in which he defends the political rights for the majority of triangles, the obtuse ones! by showing that the probability of a random triangle being obtuse is a little bit higher than you intuitively expected) and Steven B. Smith (in which he provides an account of calculating prodigies, one of them having worked at CERN until 1960s as a human computer!). ( )