Has anyone in the group read .. or started in on (it's > 10^3
pages) .. Gowers et. al.
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691118809/
I'd be interested in your reactions to the book.
Its not really a math book per se, but a book about math. It really
IS designed to be a companion, a sort of friendly mentor to help the
reader in their wandering through the math world.
It puts quite a bit of effort into classification of the branches of
mathematics and is superb at showing the inter-relations between them.
Timothy has a blog which includes the community effort building an
errata for the book. Not surprisingly, its large too!
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/pcm-errata-iii/
I'm looking forward to the second printing which is due any time now
and will include the errata fixes. (I've got a digital copy which is
less than wonderful to browse around with.)
-- Owen
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