A Tangled Tale is a collection of 10 brief humorous stories, published serially between April 1880 and March 1885 in The Monthly Packet magazine. The stories, or Knots as Carroll calls them, present mathematical problems. In a later issue, Carroll gives the solution to a Knot and discusses readers answers. The mathematical interpretations of the Knots are not always straightforward. In the December 1885 book preface Carroll wrote: The writers intention was to embody in each Knot (like medicine so dexterously, but ineffectually, concealed in the jam of our early childhood) one or more mathematical questions–in Arithmetic, Algebra, or Geometry, as the case might be–for the amusement, and possible edification, of the fair readers of that magazine.
