"God Created The Integers" is a book edited by the late Stephen Hawking. It is a collection of works by mathematicians and physicists like Euclid, Euler, Laplace, etc. Professor Hawking comments on each person's life and work. He does a marvelous job of explaining why this person was essential to mathematics.

For example, scholars agree that Euclid did not originate his results. He was a compiler of information. On the other hand, we have Archimedes. He probably developed the method of exhaustion by himself. Many of the earliest results are quite fascinating. For example, the book has a section that explains how Archimedes estimated the size of the Universe.

This book is excellent, but it has some drawbacks. The main shortcoming is the size of the print is small at times. This book is from 2007. I don't know if there is a newer edition of it.

I only understood half of the original texts. However, I am convinced that in the event of a zombie apocalypse I will risk my life to ensure that this book survives the catastrophe, for it contains the seeds of all human advancement. Such things should not be taken for granted.

Contrary to what the title could imply, there is nothing about God and the mathematics in this book (by "and" I mean "intersection", not "union"). It's a collection of short bibliography of Mathematicians, alongside a selection of their most interesting and representative publications for the history of mathematics. The material itself is interesting and refreshing, but the added value of this book is rather poor. The selection of mathematicians is somehow arbitrary and misleading about the continuous development of mathematics. Genius do no appear from nowhere.

Ive read it three times till now and I think I'll never get tired of reading it again and again.
Those who adore physics and maths should really read it *__*

Own this book although not yet started reading. This one is a great compilation of mathematical concepts and theorems needed for practising mathematicians, physicists and engineers incase they are also inspired scinetist and/or have good time to brush their knowledge with concepts of mathematics from a super-intellect.

PORNO DE MATEMÁTICA! Una enciclopedia desde la suma hasta agujeros negros y masas galacticas

This one's going to take a while.... all that math. Best read with a notepad and pencil to convert the mathematical prose into helpful little pictures.

Tried to read this and threw in the towel. It's primarily a collection of the crucial mathematical writings from Euclid on. These old texts just aren't that readable.

Hawking's introductions are very interesting, and made me want to learn more about the history of math. But they're too rapid. Dim-witted readers of my ilk need to be coaxed through this stuff.

The stuff on the progression of ancient Greek mathematics is fascinating. The Pythagoreans had a philosophy wherein numbers, and relations between them, underlay all real phenomena. This theory yielded splendid results early on, with the surprising 3-4-5/Pythagorean-theorem thing being their most spectacular success. They let it go to their heads. Their theory fell apart because they couldn't find a way to express the square root of 2 in real numbers. The Babylonians had some tricks to come close: mainly, they had figured out that 7/5 was really, really close. Try it and see for yourself: 49/25 is so close 2 that it hurts! But the Pythagoreans needed to do better than that, because they had made these strong, absolute claims about reality being made up of ratios between real numbers. Attempts to derive a real solution led to contradictions, because the premise was flawed: the square root of 2 just isn't a real number. Euclid's work was an attempt to start anew after this failure.

There is also an interesting aside about Euclid. Hawking notes that the assumptions of Euclidian space -- straight, infinite lines that take up no space, and the like -- were treated for hundreds of years as literally true in the Aristotelian physics of the west. However, Euclid and the Greeks never imagined that they were literally true, because they had a cosmology where everything in the universe was spherical and contained. The post-Einstein understanding of space as curved and the universe as limited just happens to accord with the Greeks' view.

I caught tons of copy-editing errors in the short part I read. Stephen Hawking, I will copy-edit this for you! It's gonna cost, though.

This is an interesting subject and if there exists a more accessible work than this, I would love to read it. Does anybody have a recommendation?

a very good read if you have its understanding.
Although Mr. Hawking has some pretty far out ideas.

"God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History"...

This book is packed with a rich amount of material. I took notes from this book, and in the process, I nearly filled up my entire three subject notebook.

If you're looking for a lot of history-mathematical information, this is your go-to book.

Other fantastic books on I can recommend on mathematical history are:

1.) History of Mathematics (Volume I & Volume II) by: David Eugene Smith.
2.) The Princeton Companion To Mathematics
3.) The Music of Pythagoras

I honestly should have given this book 1 star, but there was enough interesting stuff to keep it a little afloat. While the intent was great, and the introduction are engaging, the constant egregious errors make it too frustrating for me to read. There were glaring mathematical errors (in a book about math!!!) in the first 5 pages, in italicized "proven" conclusions. Really disappointed that this kind of sloppy work has Stephen Hawking's name on it.

This is a great collection of some of the more significant breakthroughs in theoretical mathematics. Though I appreciated how in the introduction he brought it back to the core and showed the sophistication of the Egyptians and Babylonians and went forward; I wish he had included Euler and Einstein.