Lizhen Ji’s new book “Great Mathematics Books of the Twentieth Century: a Personal Journey” has just been published. 季理真的新书”二十世纪伟大的数学书:个人之旅” 刚刚由高等教育出版社推出.

Great Mathematics Books of the Twentieth Century: a Personal Journey

## Preface

In this book, we list and introduce some interesting, important or useful mathematics books.  Most selected books were published during the twentieth century. For the convenience of the reader, we have arranged books according to topics. Besides some introductions and comments, we also quote from informative reviews of these books from sources including MathSciNet, Zentralblatt Math and the Bulletin of the American Mathematica Society. A common way for people to pick out books to read is to follow  recommendations of either book reviews or experts.  The list of books is probably the most interesting part of this book. Once the titles or authors’ names are known, it is  relatively easy to find valuable information and reviews about the book from many different sources  (but it might take some efforts to find good books on subjects outside one’s expertise.) In spite of this, we hope that additional information provided here about these books might be helpful and convenient. We  hope that such a list of books in contemporary mathematics might be helpful to other people and students who are interested in finding out what kind of mathematics books  exist and have been read or enjoyed by others, or who are simply interested in mathematics books.

This book could not exist without the kind help from many experts in various fields. I would like to thank the following people for their opinions, suggestions, comments, criticism, corrections, interests and encouragement: Maxim Arap, Tim Austin, Jinho Baik, Oliver Baues, Vitaly Bergelson, Jean-Michel Bismut, Andreas Blass, Patrick Boland,  Martin Bridson, Dan Burns, Peter Buser, Richard Canary, John Coates, Joseph Conlon, S.G. Dani, Igor Dolgachev, Peter Duren, Weinan E, Alexandre Eremenko, Tom Farrell, Sergey Fomin, Jacques Franchi, Kenji Fukaya, Bill Fulton, Francis Fung, Sergei Gelfand, David Harbater, William Harvey, Elton Hsu, Mattias Jonsson, Manfred Karbe, Linda Keen,  Hans Koelsch, Kai Kohler, Igor Kriz, Jeff Lagarias, Robert Lazarsfeld, Enrico Leuzinger,  Tien-Yien Li, Wenbo Li, Eduard Looijenga,  Hugh Montgomery, Kumar Murty, Louis Nirenberg, Peter Olver,  Athanase Papadopoulos,  Hugo Parlier, Katrik Prasana, Stratos Prassidis,  Mikael Ragstedt, Andrei Rapinchuk, Frank Raymond, John Schotland, Leonard Scott,  Mei-Chi Shaw,  Reyer Sjamaar, Peter Smereka, Ralf Spatzier,  Christopher Stark, Alejandro Uribe, Roman Vershynin, Divakar Viswanath, Charles Weibel, Trevor Wooley, Scott Wolpert, Ping Zhang, Weiping Zhang, Michael Zieve, and Steve Zucker.

I would also  like to thank Dr. Graeme Fairweather,  the director of MathSciNet, for his permission to quote from reviews  in MathSciNet  and Zentrablatt Math for providing me  the full access to its data base during  the preparation of this book.

Especially I would  like to thank my wife, Lan Wang, for suggesting the key word “journey” in the subtitle and for her encouragement, my oldest daughter Lena for drawing the picture for this book which is based on many famous books related to mathematics, and my youngest daughter Karen for proof-reading the preface and introduction.

Finally I would like to thank Liping Wang of the Higher Education Press for her interests in this unusual project,  and her time and efforts in carefully editing this book. She made suggestions for many new features and improvements to this book. For example, the idea of inclusion of pictures of  libraries and other buildings of University of Michigan came from her, and the idea of inclusion of many pictures of old and rare mathematics books arose from discussion with her. I would also like to thank Shannian Lu of the Higher Education Press for preparing the index of books which have been translated into Chinese or reprinted in China.

One reason for including these pictures of mathematics books is that though ancient and classical mathematics books are not read by many people now, they had greatly influenced the development of mathematics and are still interesting to many mathematicians. According to one Chinese proverb, “One picture is worth ten thousand words”. We hope that these pictures and the accompanying comments might be both interesting and informative to the reader. For example, by putting them together, we can see from these pictures of old books how book printing has changed over the past centuries, and how the authors of these books have left their permanent marks on the history of mathematics. At the beginning of each chapter and section, we have tried to select pictures which fit the topics under discussion, but it is not clear whether we have succeeded due to many obvious constraints and the lack of knowledge of the author.

All pictures used in this book come from the Special Collections Library  and the other libraries of the University of Michigan. Except for the picture of a collection of books on the cover and for the picture of the Galileo manuscript at the beginning of Chapter 10, almost all other pictures were taken by the author. I would like to thank the staff members of the  Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan, in particular the curator Peggy Daub, for providing these two special pictures and for their help  which made it possible for me to view and take pictures of over one hundred rare mathematics books at the special collections library. It was the first time I came in close contact with these great mathematics books by old masters, and flipping through these books was both a humbling and inspiring experience for me.

ISBN: 9787040375428

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