A Tangled Tale is a collection of 10 brief humorous stories by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), published serially between April 1880 and March 1885 in The Monthly Packet magazine.
Others were more receptive: In 1888 Stuart Dodgson Collingwood wrote "With some people, this is the most popular of all his books; it is certainly the most successful attempt he ever made to combine mathematics and humour.
Professor Balbus, named after a hero with "anecdotes whose vagueness in detail was more than compensated by their sensational brilliance", is given a problem by students.
The two knights of Knot I, in a modern guise, are party to a dispute about the weight of passengers' bags lost overboard from a ship.
Trading snipes as before, the aunt evades her niece's logical problem: Clara's preceptress had told her girls "The more noise you make the less jam you will have, and vice versa."
The ruler places them in "the best dungeon, and abundantly fed on the best bread and water" until they resolve a logical problem about a knitting contest.
Mad Mathesis and Clara from Knot V encounter "by a remarkable coincidence" others who are travelling not only on the same train, but at the same station, on the same day, at the same hour.
The characters of Knot II, Balbus and his two students, return to give three problems: two ones about solids in water and one about size of a garden.
The change causes a comparison with same number of readers getting a perfect score on a previous Knot to be dropped: Other examples of changes in Knot III are "Mad Mathesis dragged her off" to "Mad Mathesis hurried her on", and Clara saying "If I may go the same way round, as I did last time" to "If I may choose my train".