About the Book

GOD CREATED THE INTEGERS is Stephen Hawking's personal choice of the greatest mathematical works in history. He allows the reader to peer into the mind of a genius by providing us with excerpts from original mathematical proofs and results. He also helps us understand the progression of mathematical thought and the very foundations of our present-day technologies. The book includes landmark discoveries spanning 2500 years and represents the work of mathematicians such as Euclid, Georg Cantor, Kurt Godel, Augustin Cauchy, Bernard Riemann, and Alan Turing. Each chapter begins with a biography of the featured mathematician, clearly explaining the significance of the result, followed by the full proof of the work, reproduced from the original publication, many in new translations.

Reviews

"God created the integers, all the rest is the work of man."

Amazon.com Review

"God created the integers," wrote mathematician Leopold Kronecker, "All the rest is the work of Man." In this collection of landmark mathematical works, editor Stephen Hawking has assembled the greatest feats humans have ever accomplished using just numbers and their brains. Each of the 17 sections opens with a historical introduction of the featured author, and proceeds to a faithful translation of their most famous work. While most mathematicians will already have complete editions of Isaac Newton's Principia or Georg Cantor's Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, this book is unique in presenting just the best bits of these and other theoretical works. The collection spans 2,500 years and covers a vast range of theories: the parallel postulate, Boolean logic, differential calculus, and the philosophy of the unknowable among them. Dense with numbers, formulae, and ideas, God Created the Integers is quite challenging, but Hawking rewards curious readers with a look at how mathematics has been built. In contrast to the towering physical edifices of great civilizations of the past, Hawking writes, "The greatest wonder of the modern world is our understanding." --Therese Littleton

About the Author

Stephen William

Stephen William Hawking is an author, a physicist, and a cosmologist. Hawking has authored several academic works, books, and children's fiction. Some of his famous titles include A Brief History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, The Grand Design and Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays.