| The Princeton Companion to Mathematics | 
 enlarge | Creators: Timothy Gowers, June Barrow-green, Imre Leader
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $99.00
Buy New: $59.97
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 1008
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5.5
Dimensions (in): 10 x 8.5 x 2.6
ISBN: 0691118809
Dewey Decimal Number: 510
EAN: 9780691118802
Publication Date: September 28, 2008
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Product Description
This is a one-of-a-kind reference for anyone with a serious interest in mathematics. Edited by Timothy Gowers, a recipient of the Fields Medal, it presents nearly two hundred entries, written especially for this book by some of the world's leading mathematicians, that introduce basic mathematical tools and vocabulary; trace the development of modern mathematics; explain essential terms and concepts; examine core ideas in major areas of mathematics; describe the achievements of scores of famous mathematicians; explore the impact of mathematics on other disciplines such as biology, finance, and music--and much, much more. Unparalleled in its depth of coverage, The Princeton Companion to Mathematics surveys the most active and exciting branches of pure mathematics, providing the context and broad perspective that are vital at a time of increasing specialization in the field. Packed with information and presented in an accessible style, this is an indispensable resource for undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics as well as for researchers and scholars seeking to understand areas outside their specialties. - Features nearly 200 entries, organized thematically and written by an international team of distinguished contributors
- Presents major ideas and branches of pure mathematics in a clear, accessible style
- Defines and explains important mathematical concepts, methods, theorems, and open problems
- Introduces the language of mathematics and the goals of mathematical research
- Covers number theory, algebra, analysis, geometry, logic, probability, and more
- Traces the history and development of modern mathematics
- Profiles more than ninety-five mathematicians who influenced those working today
- Explores the influence of mathematics on other disciplines
- Includes bibliographies, cross-references, and a comprehensive index
Contributors incude: Graham Allan, Noga Alon, George Andrews, Tom Archibald, Sir Michael Atiyah, David Aubin, Joan Bagaria, Keith Ball, June Barrow-Green, Alan Beardon, David D. Ben-Zvi, Vitaly Bergelson, Nicholas Bingham, Bela Bollobas, Henk Bos, Bodil Branner, Martin R. Bridson, John P. Burgess, Kevin Buzzard, Peter J. Cameron, Jean-Luc Chabert, Eugenia Cheng, Clifford C. Cocks, Alain Connes, Leo Corry, Wolfgang Coy, Tony Crilly, Serafina Cuomo, Mihalis Dafermos, Partha Dasgupta, Ingrid Daubechies, Joseph W. Dauben, John W. Dawson Jr., Francois de Gandt, Persi Diaconis, Jordan S. Ellenberg, Lawrence C. Evans, Florence Fasanelli, Anita Burdman Feferman, Solomon Feferman, Charles Fefferman, Della Fenster, Jose Ferreiros, David Fisher, Terry Gannon, A. Gardiner, Charles C. Gillispie, Oded Goldreich, Catherine Goldstein, Fernando Q. Gouvea, Timothy Gowers, Andrew Granville, Ivor Grattan-Guinness, Jeremy Gray, Ben Green, Ian Grojnowski, Niccolo Guicciardini, Michael Harris, Ulf Hashagen, Nigel Higson, Andrew Hodges, F. E. A. Johnson, Mark Joshi, Kiran S. Kedlaya, Frank Kelly, Sergiu Klainerman, Jon Kleinberg, Israel Kleiner, Jacek Klinowski, Eberhard Knobloch, Janos Kollar, T. W. Körner, Michael Krivelevich, Peter D. Lax, Imre Leader, Jean-Francois Le Gall, W. B. R. Lickorish, Martin W. Liebeck, Jesper Lützen, Des MacHale, Alan L. Mackay, Shahn Majid, Lech Maligranda, David Marker, Jean Mawhin, Barry Mazur, Dusa McDuff, Colin McLarty, Bojan Mohar, Peter M. Neumann, Catherine Nolan, James Norris, Brian Osserman, Richard S. Palais, Marco Panza, Karen Hunger Parshall, Gabriel P. Paternain, Jeanne Peiffer, Carl Pomerance, Helmut Pulte, Bruce Reed, Michael C. Reed, Adrian Rice, Eleanor Robson, Igor Rodnianski, John Roe, Mark Ronan, Edward Sandifer, Tilman Sauer, Norbert Schappacher, Andrzej Schinzel, Erhard Scholz, Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, Gordon Slade, David J. Spiegelhalter, Jacqueline Stedall, Arild Stubhaug, Madhu Sudan, Terence Tao, Jamie Tappenden, C. H. Taubes, Rüdiger Thiele, Burt Totaro, Lloyd N. Trefethen, Dirk van Dalen, Richard Weber, Dominic Welsh, Avi Wigderson, Herbert Wilf, David Wilkins, B. Yandell, Eric Zaslow, Doron Zeilberger
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| Customer Reviews:
 A major event in mathematical publishing November 8, 2008
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is such an extraordinary book that I am still amazed that the chief editor, Timothy Gowers, managed to pull it off. The renowned mathematician Doron Zeilberger announced that if he could take only one book with him to a desert island, it would be the Princeton Companion to Mathematics.
Why such high praise? Simply put, the PCM gives a single-volume overview of all of pure mathematics, with a clarity and coherence that cannot be found anywhere else. To be sure, there do exist several good books on the history of mathematics that give a good overview of elementary mathematics and introduce the reader to some of the great mathematicians of the past. There also exist excellent "popular science" books by writers such as Martin Gardner and Ian Stewart, that explain selected topics in advanced mathematics to the lay reader in an engaging and clear manner. And there are also encyclopedias (including Wikipedia) that delineate the main branches of mathematics and give succinct definitions of all the main concepts. But only the PCM does all of these things at once, in only a thousand pages.
The PCM is all things to all people. If your mathematical background is limited, you can still learn a great deal from the more elementary sections of the book, as well as from the biographical sketches of nearly a hundred famous mathematicians of the past. At the other end of the scale, even professional mathematicians will learn something from the articles on branches of mathematics other than their own specialty. Gowers made a systematic effort to find contributors who are not only world experts in their subject, but who write extremely well. He also forced the contributors to write in as accessible and elementary a manner as possible. The result is that even highly abstruse areas of mathematics are explained here with a clarity that is difficult to find anywhere else in the mathematical literature. The PCM is thus especially valuable to mathematics majors and graduate students.
Despite the ambitious scope of the book, it retains a strong sense of unity and coherence, by consistently emphasizing the forest rather than the trees. It also gives the reader a holistic view of mathematics by devoting different sections of the book to different perspectives on the subject. For example, one section organizes mathematics by sub-discipline, while another section highlights the main results and open problems of mathematics, while yet another section picks out the most important concepts. By putting all these aspects together in one volume, the PCM gives the reader a bird's-eye view of the whole subject that is not available from Wikipedia or from a shelf full of popular books on disparate topics.
The PCM is so well-written that it can be read either cover-to-cover, or browsed at random, or consulted as a reference when needed.
One word of warning: As Gowers himself notes, the book would be more accurately titled, "The Princeton Companion to Pure Mathematics." While applications of mathematics to other fields are touched on briefly, Gowers consciously limited the book primarily to pure mathematics, in order to keep the scope of the book manageable.
Should you still have doubts about the book, you can browse parts of the book for free: Selections from the book may be found at the book's official website, and many of the contributing mathematicians have posted their own sections on their own websites (you can find these easily using Google). And for more reviews of the book, see Gowers's blog.
 Level please? October 7, 2008
2 out of 26 found this review helpful
I am not rating this book, in any strong sense, having never read it. My rating goes more to the book descriptions. The descriptions are intriguing, but lacking in a way most books on various subjects within mathematics are.
I want to know what level it is written at. I am currently in my first semester of calculus, and I intend to major in mathematics education. But is this a book I could understand most of now? Some of? Better wait a few years before getting?
very useful but not perfect October 5, 2008
5 out of 23 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful book trying to offer a spherical view of mathematics.
In general it is quite successful in that. There are however, a number
of deficiencies:
(a) there is no special chapter on mathematical physics, which is quite
strange (to say the least) for such an enormous in importance branch of mathematics. Physics is found under "mirror symmetry" and "vertex
operator algebras" which is strangely inadequate; I could not find
a discussion of mathematical physics as a mathematics discipline with its own distinguishing character and concepts at an abstract enough level to
see its deep connections with geometry;
(b) similarly, there is no clear, deep and unifying
concept and description of mathematical informatics in this book; this
topic is described in separate non-connected chapters with computational
informatics (called "theoretical computer science" in this book) that deals with information processing discussed quite separately from information communication (in the end of the book), as for the topic of
storage/retrieval informatics, this is completely absent (see the "geometry of information retrieval" by Rijsbergen for a nice intro to the relevant mathematics there);
(c) lots of space spent on mathematicians and other topics towards the end of the book could have been used in order to cover more essential topics that inform the reader about what he wants to know
when he buys this book, i.e. the concepts and methods of mathematics.
Certainly not perfect, but enjoyable and highly recommended.
mathematics: a not-so-short introduction October 5, 2008
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
Take Gowers's delightful little book, "Mathematics: a very short introduction", make it about twenty times as long, bring in a host of excellent contributors to write specialized articles, put the whole thing together very nicely, and you have the present book.
This book is not an encyclopedia, but it does offer a sweeping panorama of mathematics, written at an accessible level. It includes introductory articles on what mathematics is and basic concepts, more advanced (but still accessible) articles introducing various key concepts and areas of mathematics, articles on history of mathematics and biographies of mathematicians, descriptions of key theorems and problems, essays on the applications of mathematics, and more. There is something in here for everyone with an interest in mathematics.
As a professional mathematician, I am familiar with most of the introductory material, but I still like seeing it so nicely expressed and might use it as a teaching resource. Among the more advanced articles, there is lots of material which I feel like I "should" know, but actually don't.
The editors did an amazing job of finding really top-level people to write the specialized articles, who are both renowned experts in their areas and excellent expositors. The quality of the writing is infinitely superior to most articles in wikipedia or other online math encylopedias.
As I said, this not a comprehensive reference. The articles are introductory and designed for "bedtime reading". (Although if you read this book in bed you will probably have to sit up and put it on your lap because it is as big as a phone book.)
Anyway, I was very pleasantly surprised when I received this book. I expect to spend lots of time in the next few months browsing through it to brush up on my basic mathematical literacy. I think it will be even more useful for undergraduate mathematics students who want a good overview of what mathematics is about.
UPDATE: There is a useful page of errata, and discussion thereof, on Gowers's weblog.
Great book September 17, 2008
15 out of 20 found this review helpful
I learned about this book while I was reading a blog post on Timothy Gower's first blog post.
I have read quite a bit and I think is a wonderful book. While it does lack a lot of detail. It does excel at giving a general view at what mathematics is all about.
If you ever wonder
What is mathematics?
or what do mathematicians do. This book is a good start. The book is a compilation of essays in different topics in mathematics many written by first class mathematicians including Timothy Gowers and Terence Tao both recipient of the Fields Medal in mathematics the equivalent to the Nobel prize and many others.
I believe the book should be part of any mathematicians or aspiring mathematician library.
The book covers mathematical history and also mathematics itself. Great parts of the book could be read by high school students but for some other parts is necesary to have at least and undergrad degree to be able to understand it. I wonder if a new Ramanujan found this book if he will be able to reivent the whole of mathematics from this book?
Someone asked in Prof. Gower's Blog What knowlege prerequisites are required to be able to profit from this book and what follows is part of the answer that professor Gower's gives and I believe it could be also very useful to others considering buying this book.
"That's a good question and one that doesn't have a straightforward answer. When we started out on the book, we hoped to have a more or less uniform level of difficulty throughout. But it fairly soon became clear that that was not practical, since some parts of mathematics are much harder to explain than others, so we modified our goal to one of trying to explain everything as accessibly as possible (and ideally more accessibly than one could easily find elsewhere), even if that level of accessibility varied from article to article.
The result? I would say that if you have done high-school mathematics and were good at it, then you will understand at least some of the book, enough to make it worth reading if you have a genuine interest in the subject, a wish to learn more, and a willingness to think quite hard as you read. If you are taking university courses in the subject, then the proportion you will understand will be much higher: some parts will be heavy going, but other parts will give you very useful insights into the concepts that are being thrown at you all the time. And if you are a graduate student or professional mathematician, then the book will be a very helpful resource if you are interested in getting at least some understanding of parts of mathematics that are not your own speciality."
My simplest advice is
If you love mathematics or like mathematics this is a book to get and treasure!
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