Proofs from THE BOOK
book about mathematical proofs by Martin Aigner and Günter M. Ziegler
Proofs from THE BOOK is a book of mathematical proofs by Martin Aigner and Günter M. Ziegler, first published in 1998. The book is inspired by and named after an expression used by the mathematician Paul Erdős, who often referred to "The Book" in which God kept the best proof of each mathematical theorem. During a lecture in 1985, Erdős said, "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book." The greatest praise Erdős gave to mathematical work was to proclaim it "straight from the Book".
Aigner and Zeigler proposed to Erdős a real book that would be "a first (and very modest) approximation to 'The Book'". Erdős had many suggestions for proofs that should be included, and would have been a co-author except that he died in 1996. Proofs from THE BOOK is instead dedicated to his memory.
Including its original publication, Proofs from THE BOOK has had six editions in English, and has been translated into Persian, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Korean, Turkish, Russian, Spanish and Greek.
The American Mathematical Society awarded the 2018 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition to Aigner and Ziegler for this book.
Content
In its most recent sixth edition, Proofs from THE BOOK contains 45 chapters grouped into five parts: number theory, geometry, analysis, combinatorics and graph theory. In most cases, each chapter is devoted to a particular theorem, sometimes with multiple proofs and related results.
“Proofs from THE BOOK” enters the record as book about mathematical proofs by Martin Aigner and Günter M. Ziegler. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Proofs, BOOK and book can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1167387. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1998, 1985, 1996 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Proofs from THE BOOK” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.