Eves H.W. Return to mathematical circles. A fifth collection of mathematical stories and anecdotes

PWS-KENT Publishing Company, Boston, 1988. – 201 pp.
There can be little doubt that Arthur Conan Doyle enjoyed writing his Sherlock Holmes tales, but when he found them interfering with his "more serious" work, he felt it wise to get rid of the beloved detective. Accordingly, in "The Final Problem," at the end of the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle managed to have the detective and his arch enemy Professor Moriarty, while locked in mortal combat, presumably topple to their deaths from a ledge high above the great Reichenbach Falls of Switzerland. But Doyle's readers gave the author little peace for this dastardly act, and a number of years later he was forced to revive the famous detective, which he accomplished in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. It is in much the same vein that I now return to mathematical circles, and once again leisurely ramble around the circuit, hoping that by so doing I will appease those who, in so many letters to me, cried foul of my act of some ten years ago, when I tried to get rid of mathematical circles by bidding them an absolute farewell. I recall that, at the time, even the publisher begged me to change the title of the last book from Mathematical Circles Adieu to Mathematical Circles au Revoir.