God Created the Integers (nonfiction)

Front cover of the first edition of God Created the Integers.

God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History is an anthology, edited by Stephen Hawking, of "excerpts from thirty-one of the most important works in the history of mathematics."

The title of the book is a reference to a quotation attributed to mathematician Leopold Kronecker, who once wrote that "God made the integers; all else is the work of man."

Content

The works are grouped by author and ordered chronologically. Each section is prefaced by notes on the mathematician's life and work.

The anthology includes works by the following mathematicians:

• Euclid
• Archimedes
• Diophantus
• René Descartes
• Isaac Newton
• Leonhard Euler
• Pierre-Simon Laplace
• Joseph Fourier
• Carl Friedrich Gauss
• Augustin-Louis Cauchy
• Nikolai Lobachevsky
• János Bolyai
• Évariste Galois
• George Boole
• Bernhard Riemann
• Karl Weierstrass
• Richard Dedekind
• Georg Cantor
• Henri Lebesgue
• Kurt Gödel
• Alan Turing

Selections from the works of Euler, Bolyai, Lobachevsky and Galois, which are included in the second edition of the book (published in 2007), were not included in the first edition.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles
• Mathematician
• Mathematics

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Stephen Hawking (nonfiction)
• Integer (nonfiction)
• Leopold Kronecker (nonfiction)
• Mathematician (nonfiction)
• Mathematics (nonfiction)

External links:

• God Created the Integers @ Wikipedia