I enjoyed the biographies of the select mathematicians. However, it is more of a reference book than a typical non-fiction work. Probably would be best for someone studying the history of mathematics.

I'm a math freak and I really want to like this (along with Roger Penrose's latest) but it's very long and intensive. I keep planning to set aside a weekend just for these kind of books; sit down with a pencil and paper and get through them all. It'll probably highlight some deficiencies in my math education (even though, I'm a comp sci major that took a large number of math classes).

This book is not for the faint of heart!

Heavy reading. It got harder and harder to read as it went through, but a good collection of essays/papers.

I have read other books by Stephen Hawking and was expecting this to be similar but it is not in book to be read front the back. It is a compilation of hard to read and very complex mathematics ideas. it might be useful as a reference of historical mathematical works

I haven't finished this yet - I wasn't even sure I wanted to check it out. I was perusing the math section to find some calculus texts and brush up before next term starts, and there it was: like Brian Greene's _The Fabric of the Cosmos_, it was too intriguing to ignore.

If you don't think math history can be interesting, I dare you to read the first page and a half.

Renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking goes through the most important mathematical realizations of all time. Extremely technical, but readable because of the historical background and discussion.

This book will open your eyes to the incredible order in every-day life, giving you new appreciation for the complexity in simpleness.

I have a feing this could be a text book for those pursuing theoretical mathematics.
I'm sure to be revisiting a few chapter, especially the ones on fourier, as a lot of the concepts just bounced off me.

It was an intriguing read for a mathematician, though I have to admit some of it was skimmed. I suppose there isn't much of a way to incite passion when proving equations.

The book flows well and is nicely structured, I enjoyed the biographies of the mathematicians and it was had all round fascinating content.

The final star was dropped due to lack of readability.

this is really a good book for the mathematics lovers ........ancient mathematics shown here is EPIC.....

Very enjoyable book, but only the Hawking introductions are straight-forward readable - I used some of the works of Descartes in an essay though. In general a very thorough introduction to the concepts behind the evolution of math.

Who knew that Stephen Hawking wrote history? And a great one at that! Each chapter in this daunting ~1400 page tome is devoted to a single mathematician. The chapters provides a brief sketch of the mathematician's life and include one or more excerpts from his key publications. The biographical sketches are well written, illuminating and easy to read. The excerpts are a bit more challenging to read, especially when they are in the original, highly dated English, or translated verbatim into English from, say, 18th century German. Still, it is joy to have a volume that brings together all this material in one place, so that one can see how Laplace thought about probability, why Boole invented logic, or why Gauss was a sort of Demi-god,...

A couple other observations.
- The book skips forward more than a 1000 years from the Alexandrian mathematicians (Euclid, Diophantus, Archimedes) straight to Rene Descartes. Sounds like there was a long dark age of mathematics?
- Not to quibble with Hawking's selection of mathematicians included in this book, but it is strange that he didn't include any Indians (who gave us the so called arabic numerals and the concept of Zero), Arabs (algorithm and Algebra are both arabic words), or Egyptians (pyramids without math, surely you jest?).