Gullberg's formal training was in medicine; he compiled this scrapbook / love letter as an amateur mathematician with the conviction that mathematics should be enjoyed, like art or music. And what a scrapbook! Weighing in at over a thousand pages, there is nary a subject not touched upon. But this is not a textbook, not a handbook, not a
serious book (and I mean that in a good way). Flip to any page and find wonders tucked in among familiar formulas and diagrams. A comparison of counting numbers in the world's major languages, instructions for using an abacus, a menagerie of magic squares, a survey of methods used to compute pi, a summary of figurate numbers. In addition, each chapter begins with a whirlwind history of the topic at hand, introducing names you probably recognize (and some you do not) and putting their contributions into a larger historical perspective. Want to trace the development of calculus pre-Newton or the use of matrices all the way back to ancient China? You'll find it here.
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