Introduction
Modern minds in ancient bodies: Zeno (fifth century B.C.), Eudoxus (408-355 B.C.), Archimedes (287?-212 B.C.)
Gentleman, soldier, and mathematician: Descartes (1596-1650)
The prince of amateurs: Fermat (1601-1665)
“Greatness and misery of man”: Pascal (1623-1662)
On the seashore: Newton (1642-1727)
Master of all trades: Leibniz (1646-1716)
Nature or nurture?: the Bernoullis (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries)
Analysis incarnate: Euler (1707-1783)
A lofty pyramid: Lagrange (1736-1813)
From peasant to snob: Laplace (1749-1827)
Friends of an emperor: Monge (1746-1818), Fourier (1768-1830)
The day of glory: Poncelet (1788-1867)
The prince of mathematicians: Gauss (1777-1855)
Mathematics and windmills: Cauchy (1789-1857)
The Copernicus of geometry: Lobatchewsky (1793-1856)
Genius and poverty: Abel (1802-1829)
The great algorist: Jacobi (1804-1851)
An Irish tragedy: Hamilton (1805-1865)
Genius and stupidity: Galois (1811-1832)
Invariant twins: Sylvester (1814-1897); Cayley (1821-1895)
Master and pupil: Weierstrass (1815-1897); Sonja Kowalewski (1850-1891)
Complete independence: Boole (1815-1864)
The man, not the method: Hermite (1822-1901)
The doubter: Kronecker (1823-1891)
Anima candida: Riemann (1826-1866)
Arithmetic the second: Kummer (1810-1893), Dedekind (1831-1916)
The last universalist: Poincaré (1854-1912)
Paradise lost?: Cantor (1845-1918)

A collection of biographies describing the lives and achievements of 29 mathematicians. Includes Zeno, Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, Newton, and Leibniz.