Books like The Princeton Companion to Mathematics

01

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson · Science

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's attempt to understand the scientific story of everything — from the Big Bang to the emergence of modern humans — by spending three years talking to scientists and reading science history.

02

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

Jordan Ellenberg · Science

Jordan Ellenberg is a research mathematician who writes as if mathematics is something you would want to think about over dinner.

03

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Richard P. Feynman · Memoir

Surely You're Joking, Mr.

04

The Man Who Knew Infinity

Robert Kanigel · Biography

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in 1887 in the South Indian town of Erode into a Brahmin family of modest means, received almost no formal mathematical training, and by his mid-twenties had filled notebooks with thousands of mathematical formulas, many of them original results that professional mathematicians would spend decades verifying.

05

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

Charles Seife · Science

The number zero seems self-evidently harmless, but Charles Seife's history argues that zero has been, at various points, theologically threatening, mathematically subversive, and philosophically destabilizing.

06

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking · Science

A Brief History of Time is Stephen Hawking's attempt to explain the biggest questions in physics — where the universe came from, how it behaves, and where it might be going — to readers with no scientific training.