Proofs from THE BOOK 4th ed. 2010. Corr. 3rd printing 2013 Edition

by Martin Aigner (Author), Günter M. Ziegler (Author), Karl H. Hofmann (Illustrator)

21 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-3642008559

ISBN-10: 3642008550

Why is ISBN important?

Trade in your item
Get a $6.75
Gift Card.

Trade in
Learn More

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Share

Rent

$37.06

Due Date: Dec 19, 2016 Rental Details

FREE return shipping at the end of the semester.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with rentals.

In Stock. Rented from RentU , Fulfilled by Amazon

List Price: $49.95 Save: $12.89 (26%)

Free Shipping

Add to Rental Cart

More Buying Choices

7 New from $123.02 24 Used from $45.00

31 used & new from $45.00

See All Buying Options

There is a newer edition of this item:

Proofs from THE BOOK

Proofs from THE BOOK
$59.99
(3)
In Stock.

Free%20Two-Day%20Shipping%20for%20College%20Students%20with%20Amazon%20Student

PaulErdos ? likedtotalkaboutTheBook,inwhichGodmaintainstheperfect proofsformathematicaltheorems,followingthedictumofG. H. Hardythat there is no permanent place for ugly mathematics. Erdos ? also said that you need not believe in God but, as a mathematician, you should believe in The Book. A few years ago, we suggested to him to write up a ?rst (and very modest) approximation to The Book. He was enthusiastic about the idea and, characteristically, went to work immediately, ?lling page after page with his suggestions. Our book was supposed to appear in March 1998 as a present to Erdos ? ’ 85th birthday. With Paul’s unfortunate death in the summer of 1996, he is not listed as a co-author. Instead this book is dedicated to his memory. ? Paul Erdos We have no de?nition or characterization of what constitutes a proof from The Book: all we offer here is the examples that we have selected, h- ing that our readers will share our enthusiasm about brilliant ideas, clever insights and wonderful observations. We also hope that our readers will enjoy this despite the imperfections of our exposition. The selection is to a ? great extent in?uencedby Paul Erdos himself. A largenumberof the topics were suggested by him, and many of the proofs trace directly back to him, or were initiated by his supreme insight in asking the right question or in makingthe rightconjecture. So to a largeextentthisbookre?ectstheviews of Paul Erdos ? as to what should be considered a proof from The Book.

Proofs from THE BOOK

Available from these sellers.

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

G. Polya

106

Paperback
$14.21
Kenneth Kunen

5

Paperback
$24.00
Richard Hammack

40

Paperback
$15.65
Stephen Abbott

77

Hardcover
$53.60
Ronald L. Graham

59

Hardcover
$69.05
Martin Gardner

17

Paperback

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested In These Sponsored Links

(What's this?)

NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE

Product Details

Hardcover: 274 pages
Publisher: Springer; 4th ed. 2010. Corr. 3rd printing 2013 edition (October 13, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 3642008550
ISBN-13: 978-3642008559
Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.7 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,037,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #169 in Books > Science & Math > Mathematics > Pure Mathematics > Combinatorics
- #340 in Books > Science & Math > Mathematics > Pure Mathematics > Number Theory
- #444 in Books > Science & Math > Mathematics > Pure Mathematics > Logic

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested In These Sponsored Links

(What's this?)

Customer Reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars

5 star		81%
4 star		4%
3 star		5%
2 star		0%
1 star		10%

Write a customer review

See all 21 customer reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Kindle edition is worthless: avoid at all costs

ByT. Smithon April 23, 2008

Format: Kindle Edition

NOTE: This review is JUST for the Kindle edition.

The Kindle edition is completely worthless, because it is missing many symbols. It appears to have been done using OCR, and it was confused by mathematical symbols. For example, there are some places where I THINK it was supposed to be the greek letter phi, but it comes out as a left parenthesis and a right parenthesis. At least with that you can figure out what it was supposed to be. There is much worse--places where symbols are completely gone. E.g., there is a place where you just get a capital sigma with a subscript giving a summation limit, a blank space, a less than sign, and another blank space. So, the proof is saying the some of *something* is less than *something else*.

This is a shame, because the book itself, from what I can see, is EXCELLENT.

44 comments 136 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Do NOT get the Kindle edition

ByDr. Hoenikkeron July 7, 2008

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The Kindle edition of the book is missing or misrepresenting math symbols in so many places it makes it completely unreadable.

0Comment 114 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Excellent, but bizarre and atypical book on mathematics

ByAlexander C. Zorachon October 22, 2006

Format: Hardcover

I agree with what most of the other authors have said. This is a wonderful book, if only a bit strange. The book is very clearly written and easy to follow, although many of the proofs require a great deal of contemplation in order to fully understand.

This is one of those books that a serious mathematician will probably enjoy picking up and reading from time to time. It is neither a reference nor a textbook, but more a source of mathematical inspiration, a collection of particularly elegant mathematical results. My favourite aspect of this book is the way it focuses on proofs and results that draw connections between different areas of mathematics. The interconnectedness of mathematics is too often ignored by researchers nowadays, who have become specialized to the point that their work is often inaccessible. This book is a healthy step in the opposite direction.

My only complaint about this book (and it's not really about this book at all) is that there are not more books like this. The book is heavily slanted towards number theory, combinatorics, and graph theory. The chapter on analysis is beautiful, but atypical of analysis as a whole. I think that it would be wonderful for people to write similar books in other topics, in particular, analysis, algebra, or probability or topology like the other reviewer mentioned.

As a final note I would like to give credit to the publisher for doing a good job on this one. The typesetting is excellent, the layout is clear with all the illustrations, the paper is of high quality, and the binding is oustanding. It has held up well to moderate use and still looks brand new. I only wish some of my more heavily-used reference texts were bound like this.

0Comment 28 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

A breath of pure air

ByChris Hobbson October 24, 2002

Format: Hardcover

I stumbled across this book and am amazed that I had not heard about it before. Since buying it, I have kept it by my bedside and have now read the whole book four or five times, picking up more of the subtleties at each reading.
The proofs are almost all magnificent (although I wonder how Buffon and his needles got in there) and even the well-known and time-honoured ones have a new twist or new extension.
The level of mathematics required to follow the proofs is reasonably low (high-school 'A' levels in the British system, no idea about other countries) although the book gives a deeper explanation in some areas (e.g. trans-finite arithmetic) than in others (e.g. number theory). I wonder if this unevenness reflects the interests of the authors.
But these are tiny nit-pickings. This is a wonderful and inspiring book and reading it should be made compulsory by the government in all high-school mathematics classes.

0Comment 27 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

A Nice Survey of some Interesting Propositions with (pretty much) Elementary Solutions

ByEllipsicon December 29, 2005

Format: Hardcover

Most of this book could be read by an undergraduate with only background in calculus and basic discrete math. The proofs are mostly self-contained, and there are helpful appendices to each chapter when prerequisite material is needed. I think this would be a good book for undergraduates or enthusiastic high school students to read for fun, or for lecturers to draw interesting examples from.

The proofs, while "elementary," are sometimes quite involved, however, and do require some maturity to be able to appreciate the "big picture" of each proof, and it's tempting to "island-hop" (i.e., just check that each if... then... works out in the proof, without looking at the whole thing put together). This would be especially nice material for an undergraduate math club or for math enthusiasts to read at liesure. The problems are also highly "integrated," in that they make use of ideas from several different types of math, and are not usually straightforward, so they are good examples of creative solutions to challenging problems.

0Comment 14 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

A fitting tribute to the great Paul Erdos

ByKARTIK KRISHNAN S.on March 20, 2001

Format: Hardcover

Paul Erdos once remarked that you need not believe in God, but you certainly have to believe in the book in which God maintains the "perfect" mathematical proofs. Martin Aigner and Gunter Ziegler have certainly done a great job with this book, a fitting tribute to the great Erdos himself.
I had purchased a copy of the 1st edition of this book and was plesantly surprised that the authors had come up with a 2nd edition, with a few more "perfect" proofs.
My personal favorites are "The Shannon capacity of a graph". where the Lovasz theta number would eventually lead to semidefinite programming, Erdos' probabilistic method where probability makes counting sometimes easy, computing the number of trees in a graph, how many guards it takes to guard a museum, and the section on Turan's theorem.
This book deserves to be on the bookshelves of both amateur and professional mathematicians.

0Comment 17 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Proofs from the Book

ByEnrique Treviño and Yuliia Glushchenkoon August 23, 2006

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

The famous eccentric mathematician had a theory that God (who he liked to call the SF-Supreme Fascist) had a book with every mathematical theorem and that the book had the most beautiful and elegant proofs for the theorems.

This book has that philosophy and presents great proofs for many beautiful theorems.

It is a masterpiece. A book that shows why mathematicians love what they do.

0Comment 13 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Customer Images

See all customer images

Most Recent Customer Reviews

While most of the book could be read by a good undergraduate, I'm not sure I would recommend that ...

As indicated in other reviews this is more a mathematicians coffee table book than a
reference book or a teaching aid.Read more

Published 1 year ago by math student

A journey into the "double life" of mathematics and the art of mathematical proof

The late mathematician and philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota referring to the age old (and perhaps unanswerable) question - "are mathematical ideas invented or discovered?"

Published on February 11, 2014 by Shubhendu Trivedi

Each proof is a brilliant piece of mathematics, and the exposition is very clear and accessible for non-specialists. This book shows mathematics at its best.

Published on September 30, 2013 by a student

A wonderful book

This book is a gem that holds the most beautiful proofs of well-known problems of Mathematics. A feast for any lover of Math.

Published on July 23, 2013 by Ricardo Mansilla

This book has a splendid collection of arguably the most beautiful theorems in mathematics. The authors also present the most elegant proofs for these theorems.

Published on September 12, 2012 by ARollingStone

great books for the people who think math is fun

Not a professional mathematician, I feel this book is challenging enough to be interesting, but not beyond what I can follow.Read more

Published on September 19, 2011 by joe

I think that Proofs from the Book, is a title that every mathematicians should have on his desk.
Wonderful and very elegant proofs of some interesting Theorems in several...Read more

Published on January 4, 2011 by eliogabalo

Elegance Proofs from the Book

My French Professors in France always demanded rigourous proof from us, but never emphasized elegance is equally important, if not more.

Published on May 23, 2009 by WuBing

A different kind of book

This is a different kind of math book. It is not a textbook. Neither is it a monograph on a special math topic.

Published on July 27, 2008 by Chee Lim Cheung

this is THE BOOK!

One of the most important mathematicians in the last quarter of a century was, arguably, Paul Erdos.

Published on September 13, 2007 by Oscar Vega

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?

Proofs from THE BOOK Hardcover

Martin Aigner

3

$59.99
How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Princeton Science Library) Paperback

G. Polya

106

$14.21
Book of Proof Paperback

Richard Hammack

40

$15.65
Journey through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics Paperback

William Dunham

160

$10.89

Conditions of Use
Privacy Notice
Interest-Based Ads
© 1996-2016, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates