Timothy Gowers: A quick post to give an update on the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. It’s been off my hands for a few weeks now. If all goes well it will be printed by the middle of September and should appear in bookshops about a month later. This is what the cover will be like. (If I work out how to do it, I’ll get a reduced-size picture of the cover to appear as part of this post rather than as a link.) If you go to this page on the PUP website then you will find a podcast interview that I gave, which contains information that does not appear on this blog.
Timothy Gowers is a Fields Medal winning British mathematician. This volume seems to be this generation of mathematician's attempt at explaining what they do, just as previous generations of mathematicians have done, for example, with Mathematics, Its Content, Methods, and Meaning by the Russian school and the Bourbaki series by the French school. At 1000 pages and nearly 200 entires, I imagine it would be more like an encyclopedia than anything else. However, a glance at the contributors list will convince any mathematician that this volume is a worthy addition to the bookshelf.
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