'Bonkers' Crochet book knits up oddest title prize

This year's Diagram Prize for oddest book title has gone to Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, by mathematician Daina Taimina.

The 32nd annual award, which carries no monetary reward, was announced late Friday by The Bookseller, a U.K. trade magazine.

"I've never won any prizes before. This is my first prize and it's wonderful," said Taimina, who teaches at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

The book details how Taimina uses crochet to create hyperbolic planes in which lines curve away from each other instead of running parallel.  Her pieces look like complex flowers.

"These are two-dimensional objects which you can see only in three dimensions," explains Taimina.

Philip Stone, an editor with The Bookseller, said the professor's book won because "very simply, the title is completely bonkers."

"On the one hand you have the typically feminine, gentle and woolly world of needlework and on the other, the exciting but incredibly un-woolly world of hyperbolic geometry and negative curvature … the two worlds collide in a captivating and quite breathtaking way," Stone said in a statement.

The second and third-place finishers were: What Kind of Bean is This Chihuahua? and Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich.

Others in the running include:

• Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter.
• Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots.
• The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

Last year's winner was The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais by Philip M. Parker.

Winners are chosen through a public vote. More than 4,500 people voted online this year, Stone said.