Artin understood the beauty of mathematics. Unlike so many who understood, he also shared. Distinguished by his solutions to two Hilbert problems, he was also a greatly admired teacher in Germany and, after escaping nazism, the US. This collection of Artin's work includes his books Galois Theory, The Gamma Function and The Theory of Algebraic Numbers, and papers on the axiomatic characterization of fields with George Whaples, real fields ("A Characterization of the Field of Real Algebraic Numbers," "The Algebraic Construction of Real Fields" and "A Characterization of Real Closed Fields") in their first English translation, and the theory of braids. The collection concludes with papers on the theory of complex functions, a proof of the Krein-Milman Theorem, and a review of the influence of Wedderburn on modern algebra. Editor Michael Rosen includes a lively introduction and well-chosen photographs. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)