Target Audience
The book's authors have attempted to keep their work accessible by forgoing abstraction and technical nomenclature as much as possible and by making heavy use of concrete examples and illustrations. Compared to the concise and factual coverage of mathematics in sources such as Wikipedia and MathWorld, the articles in the Princeton Companion are intended to be more reflective and discursive, and to convey the beauty and depth of modern mathematics. Quoting a passage from Bertrand Russell that "Pure Mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form p implies q", the editor of the Companion states that it "is about everything that Russell’s definition leaves out."
The core sections of the Companion are aimed primarily at readers who are already familiar with mathematics at the undergraduate level. Much of the rest of the book, such as its collection of biographies, would be accessible to a mathematically inclined high school student, and there is enough depth of coverage in the book to interest even professional research mathematicians. Reviewer Jonathan Borwein summarizes the audience for this book broadly:
| “ | Every research mathematician, every university student of mathematics, and every serious amateur of mathematical science should own at least one copy of the Companion. | ” |
Read more about this topic: The Princeton Companion To Mathematics
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