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From the Reviews:

"... Inside PFTB (Proofs from The Book) is indeed a glimpse of mathematical heaven, where clever insights and beautiful ideas combine in astonishing and glorious ways. There is vast wealth within its pages, one gem after another. Some of the proofs are classics, but many are new and brilliant proofs of classical results. ...Aigner and Ziegler... write: "... all we offer is the examples that we have selected, hoping that our readers will share our enthusiasm about brilliant ideas, clever insights and wonderful observations." I do. ... " Notices of the AMS, August 1999

"... the style is clear and entertaining, the level is close to elementary ... and the proofs are brilliant. ..." LMS Newsletter, January 1999

This third edition offers two new chapters, on partition identities, and on card shuffling. Three proofs of Euler's most famous infinite series appear in a separate chapter. There is also a number of other improvements, such as an exciting new way to "enumerate the rationals".

Customer Rating:
Summary: A different kind of book
Comment: This is a different kind of math book. It is not a textbook. Neither is it a monograph on a special math topic. It is a eclectic collection of proofs largely from number theory, combinatorics, graph theory and discrete mathematics in general. It is inspired by what the famous peripatetic mathematician Paul Erdos would like to see in God's BOOK. In my view, this book is best appreciated by dipping in occasionally when you are in the mood or when you have read a proof in another book and would like to see how it is done in this book. Most of the proofs are accessible to undergraduates or even college students.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Do NOT get the Kindle edition
Comment: The Kindle edition of the book is missing or misrepresenting math symbols in so many places it makes it completely unreadable.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Kindle edition is worthless: avoid at all costs
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: this is THE BOOK!
Comment: One of the most important mathematicians in the last quarter of a century was, arguably, Paul Erdos. At least we could say he was the one who travelled the most, and who had more collaborations with other mathematicians in the areas of Graph Theory, Combinatorics, etc.

One of his dreams was to assemble a collection of all the most beautiful proofs in Mathematics, in which God would maintain the perfect proofs in mathematical theorems. This collection would be called The Book. Unfortunately, he didn't see his dream fulfilled while among us, but after his death Agner and Ziegler wrote this excellent book, "Proofs from THE BOOK", as a nice excerpt of what The Book could have been.

Topics in this book range from Number Theory to Analysis, and also discussing Combinatorics and Graph Theory. Most of the proofs are accessible to everybody with some mathematical training, they are beautiful and surprisingly simple.

I just love this book, in the last five years or so I have bought several copies of it, as it has been my favorite gift for people who want to discover a little more about the beauty of Mathematics.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Fantastic exploration into mathematics
Comment: We used it for an undergraduate statistics seminar series; and that was largely a success. PFTB contains many of the most elegant proofs I have ever seen. Reading through it is, by itself, an enjoyable journey through some aspects of many branches of mathematics. A few of its chapters may not address the average undergraduate math population quite well, due to its depth of reasoning and assumption of prior knowledge in Abstract Algebra and Geometry; but those who reads it are likely to be more advanced anyway. In general, an excellent book.

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