Mathematical concepts are explained in this illustrated set, along with a fascinating historical overview of the field. It explores the uses and effects of math in daily life, and provides information on different career choices in this field. Each volume includes sidebars, bibliographies, timelines, charts, a glossary, a guide to resources on the Web, and individual and cumulative indexes.

Because this encyclopedia takes a refreshing, cross-disciplinary approach, it is hard to compare it to existing standard mathematics encyclopedias such as The Prentice-Hall Encyclopedia of Mathematics (Prentice-Hall, 1982) or The VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics (2d ed., Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1989), where most pages are full of "pure" mathematical explanation and symbols. Here, articles are arranged alphabetically, and headings, subheadings, and nicely spaced text make the reader more comfortable than seeing a mass of symbols and very little text. Terms are defined in the margins, and in many cases, the bibliography at the end of an article contains Internet resources as well as books.