It's one of those books that people who are really into maths would enjoy, for the rest of the world it might not be a nice experience. But hands down, a great piece of work!!!

0 stars.

Basically, the only thing worth reading is the short biographies of the mathematicians. Like most people who left a review, the maths parts are mostly unable to be followed, or else you might as well be spending those time pursuing a maths bachelor's degree. I suspect that even those who have maths bachelor's degree would find many of the maths paper there very hard to follow if they don't learn it before.

This book contains well written and fascinating short biographies of the greatest mathematicians throughout human history.
They serve to introduce over 1000 pages of math essays that are too ancient or too advanced to be of interest to most people.
This book must weigh close to 10 pounds. Still, you can finish the biographies in an evening. They're a good read.

Hmm...probably another book I will always still be reading.

This is huge (like, 1100+ pages) and full of math (like, equations, and diagrams, and such) and I doubt I'll ever finish reading it, but the idea of it is so beautiful I had to have it. I expect I'm just going to keep turning the pages as in a trance, eyes glazed as I recite, "sine squared theta plus cos squared theta equals one" over and over...

Compulsive book buying: 1 Efforts at elevating myself out of poverty: 0

Stephen Hawking's commentary placed beside great works of mathematical genius really isn't very good. The collection of works all together like this is fantastic and interesting but his commentary on the works was severely lacking and mostly uninteresting.

Always reading... Its a ref for me...

This is one book I will savour for the rest of my life.I have often referred to it and I always will.This is a book that marries ET Bell with Vakil Naik.A fantastic collection edited by a brilliant physicist.

Dios creó los números es un excelente libro para realizar consultas sobre teoremas fundamentales de la matemática. Si bien puede ser intimidante por la cantidad de paginas, es muy agradable de leer. recomiendo tener por lo menos nociones básicas sobre el tema.

Look at the number of pages in this book. It is a tome. I sort of finished the book, since I read all of the biographies. But I only skimmed through the original mathematical papers. No doubt Hawking read and understood very word that he included in the process of editing. Kudos to him. I admire him greatly.

This book is not at all what I expected, but I managed to enjoy it none the less. The majority of the pages are arduous, complex mathematical proofs that extend in difficulty far beyond my education in university calculus. What remains are the miniature biographies Hawking writes of the 17 featured mathematicians. In short, I really enjoyed the intriguing life stories but had to skip most of the featured works.

Great book. I like it