Daina Taimina is a mathematician at Cornell University

Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, a book on how to make geometric models using needlepoint, has won a prize given to oddly-titled books.

Written by Latvian mathematician Daina Taimina, it was adjudged the winner of the annual Diagram Prize after a public vote run by the Bookseller magazine.

Other candidates included Afterthoughts Of A Worm Hunter and Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich.

Last year's prize went to a guide to containers of Fromage Frais.

Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University, uses crochet to illustrate the properties of hyperbolic planes.

Difficult to model, these are forms in which lines curve away from each other instead of running parallel or converging.

Her creations, which resemble complex coral formations, have been hailed by academics and included in art shows.

The Diagram Prize has been running since 1978 under the watchful eye of The Bookseller's Horace Bent.

Mr Bent attributed the book's win to "the public proclivity towards non-Euclidian needlework".