The Princeton Companion to Mathematics Review

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The Princeton Companion to Mathematics ReviewThe 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.The Princeton Companion to Mathematics Overview

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