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God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History Paperback – October 9, 2007
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- Print length1376 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRunning Press Adult
- Publication dateOctober 9, 2007
- Dimensions6 x 2 x 9.13 inches
- ISBN-100762430044
- ISBN-13978-0762430048
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Product details
- Publisher : Running Press Adult; New edition (October 9, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 1376 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0762430044
- ISBN-13 : 978-0762430048
- Item Weight : 3.7 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 2 x 9.13 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #557,123 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #361 in Mathematics History
- #652 in Algebra
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Stephen Hawking's ability to make science understandable and compelling to a lay audience was established with the publication of his first book, A Brief History of Time, which has sold nearly 10 million copies in 40 languages. Hawking has authored or participated in the creation of numerous other popular science books, including The Universe in a Nutshell, A Briefer History of Time, On the Shoulders of Giants, The Illustrated On the Shoulders of Giants, and George's Secret Key to the Universe.
(Stephen William Hawking; Oxford, Reino Unido, 8 de Enero de 1942 - Cambridge, 14 de marzo de 2018) Físico teórico británico. A pesar de sus discapacidades físicas y de las progresivas limitaciones impuestas por la enfermedad degenerativa que padecía, Stephen William Hawking es probablemente el físico más conocido entre el gran público desde los tiempos de Einstein. Luchador y triunfador, a lo largo de toda su vida logró sortear la inmensidad de impedimentos que le planteó el mal de Lou Gehrig, una esclerosis lateral amiotrófica que le aquejaba desde que tenía 20 años. Hawking es, sin duda, un ejemplo particular de vitalidad y resistencia frente al infortunio del destino.
Fue miembro de la Real Sociedad de Londres, de la Academia Pontificia de las Ciencias y de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Estados Unidos. Fue titular de la Cátedra Lucasiana de Matemáticas (Lucasian Chair of Mathematics) de la Universidad de Cambridge desde 1979 hasta su jubilación en 2009. Entre las numerosas distinciones que le han sido concedidas, Hawking ha sido honrado con doce doctorados honoris causa y ha sido galardonado con la Orden del Imperio Británico (grado CBE) en 1982, el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de la Concordia en 1989, la Medalla Copley en 2006, la Medalla de la Libertad en 2009 y el Premio Fundación BBVA Fronteras del Conocimiento en 2015.
Alcanzó éxitos de ventas con sus trabajos divulgativos sobre Ciencia, en los que discute sobre sus propias teorías y la cosmología en general; estos incluyen A Brief History of Time, que estuvo en la lista de best-sellers del The Sunday Times británico durante 237 semanas.
La Editorial Alvi Books le dedicó, como tributo y reconocimiento, este espacio en Amazon en 2016.
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I knew that the book had flaws because I read these reviews a while ago. But so what! You wouldn't use this book for reference or as a text book. It's meant to be entertainment and entertaining it is. If you can understand the maths and the significance of the selected papers you can enjoy it without worrying too much about everything being crossed and dotted.
I knew the biographies of many, but not all, of these men. Of the ones I didn't know, my favorite is George Boole. The description of his unusual career and the amazingly clear and readable paper on symbolic logic are worth buying the book for. I almost choked up when I read how he died.
Anyway, in our age or irrationality and ignorance we need more books like this to show us that we can rise above it all.
The mathematicians in this book exhibited a lot of ingenuity and creativity, and the author has given the reader a look at their contributions as they themselves wrote them down, thanks to the efforts of the translators. Assuming the accuracy of the translations, the reader gets a view of mathematics through a representative time-window of the thoughts and personalities of some of the major players throughout the history of mathematics. The reader learns of the arrogance of Isaac Newton and Pierre Laplace, the shyness of George Boole, the extreme creativity of Georg Riemann, the computational prowess of Carl Gauss, the politics of Jean Fourier, the self-absorption of Archimedes, the encyclopedic mind of Euclid, the arithmetic of Diophantus, the polymathic nature of the mind of Rene Descartes, and the prolific mind of Augustin-Louis Cauchy.
When reading the brief life histories of these individuals with all of their variability and disparate life histories, one is tempted to believe solely in a genetic origin of mathematical talent. Their personalities were very different but their aptitude in mathematics was profound. A great deal of their personal conduct could be viewed as reprehensible from a moral or ethical point of view, and the infighting that occurred among some of them was extremely juvenile. If the biographies of these individuals were rewritten to purposely omit their contributions to mathematics, a neutral reader would probably characterize them as being highly unintelligent. This again raises the debate over the concept of `general intelligence' versus that of `specialized' or `modularized' intelligence. These individuals certainly had a talent for mathematics, but does this talent, indeed the talent possessed by all mathematicians, find its origin in specialized regions in the human brain? If so, is there a correlation between mathematical skills and other types of specialized skills?
One is also struck by the difficulty that some of these individuals had in finding suitable employment. The difficulties they faced in finding employment did not discourage them from performing research in mathematics. Too often these days many aspiring and talented young mathematicians complain of not being able to find suitable employment, and even feel they have a right to a tenured position at a major research institution. A reading of this book should put their beliefs in proper perspective and dissuade them from blaming the academic establishment for their failures to obtain employment.
When reading the book, one can see the growing tension between applied and pure mathematics in the nineteenth century. Most, if not all of the mathematicians in this book were also very practical people: they could build bridges and design military hardware for example Contemporary (pure) mathematicians rarely have these abilities, and frequently pride themselves on not having them. In addition, some of the mathematicians of this book did not hesitate in indulging themselves in "experimental mathematics". When reading their papers in the book, one is struck by how much they used natural language, in how "wordy" their articles are. The proofs they gave explained the mathematics and did not just expound on them. They did not hesitate to use diagrams or pictures. This is to be contrasted with the manner in which contemporary mathematics is reported in the literature: it considers pictures an anathema, and strict, formalist "Bourbaki" language is to be used (although natural language of course still appears to a large degree).
One can only speculate on what would have happened if some of these mathematicians had access to modern technology. What would have happened if Gauss had a calculator? What if Fourier had a music synthesizer? One can only admire their willingness to indulge themselves in difficult and time-consuming calculations, especially in the field of celestial mechanics.
The list of the mathematicians in this book does not include any female mathematicians. One cannot blame adversity for this, but one could perhaps blame the unwillingness of the academic community to accept their contributions. This rejection though should not be thought of as directed only to female mathematicians. The individuals in this book had their own subjective preferences on what constituted interesting mathematics. They rejected the ideas they did not prefer and accepted the ones that they did, and they did so independent of the sex of the individual mathematician.
The mathematicians of this book definitely set the tone for most of the mathematics that was done in the twentieth century and is being done in the twenty-first. But there is also a huge body of mathematics that was not influenced by them, and these contributions are just as interesting and important. The seventeen mathematicians in this book would no doubt be astounded by some of these developments, for they are very exotic if compared with the content of their mathematical constructions. One of the most fascinating of these developments (influenced to a small degree by George Boole) is automated mathematical discovery. If a book like this is rewritten at the end of the twenty-first century, the list of seventeen mathematicians will probably include some that are not human.
Some years ago, William Dunham wrote and exceedingly unusual and charming book, Journey Through Genius. It was a collection of famous theorems, their proofs, a slice of life of the time, often lemmas and corrolaries, etc. A unique gem, it stood out among other books that challenge the busy, but modern mind. I had to read it with a notepad next to me--I didn't always believe it until I proved it myself.
And now guess who discovered the great idea but the incessantly novel Mr. Hawking! Had he limited his treatments to mathematicians that Dunham hadn't covered, maybe there would be an excuse, but in several cases, e.g., Kantor's transfinite numbers, he just duplicates it.
I gave this 3 stars because, if it had stood alone, it would have been good. I took away stars because it was just this side of plagiarism.
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Die Beiträge reichen von Euklid, Archimedes und Diophantos , über Descartes und Newtons Pricinpia, mit denen die Neuzeit eingeleitet wird, Fourier ist einer der ersten, der neue analytische Methoden auf physikalische Probleme angewandt hat. Die Disquisitiones leiten schließlich die Mathematik des 19. Jahrhunderts ein, jenem Werk, mit dem Gauß die Zahlentheorie erstmals auf eine systematische Basis stellte. Mit Cauchy, Weierstraß und Dedekind setzt sich eine zunehmende Strenge in der Mathematik durch. Riemann ist der einzige, der in dieser Sammlung gleich mit drei Veröffentlichungen vertreten ist, dazu gehört auch sein Arbeiten zur Anzahl von Primzahlen. Die Aufsätze von Gödel und Turing sind Meilensteine der Mathematik des beginnenden 20. Jahrhunderts, die mit den Methoden der Formalisierung Begriffe wie ‘Beweisbarkeit‘ und ‘Berechenbarkeit‘ mit den Mitteln der Mathematik selbst untersuchen und zu erstaunlichen Ergebnissen gelangen. Merkwürdig – oder lustig – ist allerdings, das der Titel aus einem Zitat Kroneckers, der nicht in den Band aufgenommen wurde, abgeleitet ist: „Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk..“
Während im humanistischen Bereich, das Studium von Originalarbeiten unabdingbar ist, werden wohl nur wenige Mathematikstudenten je eine der Arbeiten dieser Sammlung direkt in den Händen gehalten haben. Das liegt natürlich auch am besonderen Charakter der Mathematik, in der es auf besondere Strömungen und Ansichten kaum ankommt, entscheidend sich exakte Formulierungen und deren Beweise; insofern sind Erkenntnisse, die im Laufe der Geschichte angesammelt wurden, im heutigen Kanon der Mathematik aufgehoben – wenn auch oft in transformierter Form. So ist der Inhalt der Arbeiten dieser Sammlung heute wohlbekannt oder gehört gar zur mathematischen ‘Folklore‘. Aber wie Niels Bohr im Hinblick auf die Quantentheorie sagte, zu einem wahren und tiefen Verständnis der Theorie, jenseits der Anwendung ihrer formalen Regeln, gelangt man erst, wenn man auch die historischen Hintergründe und die Entwicklung ihrer Begriffe und Konzept kennt. Das gilt sicher sinngemäß für alle exakten Wissenschaften. Es ist somit gerade das Faszinierende an diesem Buch, dass es die Entstehung und Entwicklung berühmter Ideen, an Hand ihrer Quellen, nachvollziehbar macht, und das auch für eine Leserschaft, die u.U. nicht ständigen Zugang zu den Monographien und Zeitschriftenbänden einer Universitätsbibliothek hat.
Den Beiträgen vorangestellt sind jeweils ein kurze Einführungen zum Leben und Werk ihrer Autoren. Das Buch steht damit in der Tradition von “On the shoulders of giants“ (2002) (dt.: Die Klassiker der Physik (2004)), das Auszügen aus bahnbrechenden Arbeiten von fünf Physikern und Astronomen wieder aufgelegt hatte.
Da der Verfasser des ‚Life and Work‘- Abschnitts zu Newton, erwähnt, dass er, wie einst Newton, Inhaber des Lucasischen Lehrstuhls in Cambridge ist, wird klar, dass dieser biographische Abriss Teil der Kommentare ist, die Hawking beigesteuert hat. Leider geht nicht hervor, ob sich dass auf alle anderen solcher Texte bezieht, da die Herausgeber nirgends namentlich erscheinen. Da aber das Zusammenstellen solcher historischer Begleittexte eher eine editorische Standardtätigkeit ist, ist nicht anzunehmen, dass sich Hawking diese 2006 aufgebürdet hat. Es handelt sich wohl eher um ein Produkt der “Hawking Book Factory“, das der Verleger unter dem Namen von Stephen Hawking herausgebracht hat – nach dem Welterfolg von ‘A Brief History of Time‘, sicher ein Verkaufsargument.
Völlig unverständlich ist allerdings die lieblose Ausstattung des Buches. Nicht nur, dass ein, in einem solchen Werk unverzichtbare, Index fehlt, gibt es weder Anmerkungen zum Text, noch eine Bibliographie, abgesehen von den minimalen ‘text and pricture credits‘.
A compilation of great works by Mathematicians through History. You need to understand basic mathematical terms and notations before buying this..like limits and summation...series and geometry and algebra. Overall..great book...a little inconvenient font size but that is kind of obvious.
Reviewed in India on October 12, 2020
A compilation of great works by Mathematicians through History. You need to understand basic mathematical terms and notations before buying this..like limits and summation...series and geometry and algebra. Overall..great book...a little inconvenient font size but that is kind of obvious.














