From Terence Tao’s excellent blog, I learned about the upcoming Princeton Companion to Mathematics (PCM), a roughly 1000-page survey of and introduction to mathematics at the undergraduate level. It looks like the PCM editors have lined up a distinguished cast of mathematicians to write comprehensible articles covering all of mathematics. The editor-in-chief is Timothy Gowers, who like Tao is a Fields Medalist, and who has very recently started his own blog.
Gowers gives instructions for finding a large sample of articles that will appear in the book, but they are not completely transparent, so follow these:
- Go here.
- Use Username “Guest” and Password “PCM”.
- Click on “Resources” in the sidebar.
- Click on “Sample articles” in the sidebar.
You’ll find many interesting and highly readable articles in .pdf format.
Nerd Wisdom 