I have never encountered a book of this kind. The best description of it I can give is that it is a mystery novel... I found it hard to stop reading before I finished (in two days) the whole text. Soifer engages the reader's attention not only mathematically, but emotionally and esthetically. May you enjoy the book as much as I did!

"This book provides an exciting history of the discovery of Ramsey Theory, and contains new research along with rare photographs of the mathematicians who developed this theory, including Paul Erdös, B.L. van der Waerden, and Henry Baudet."

Merry-Go-Round.- A Story of Colored Polygons and Arithmetic Progressions.- Colored Plane.- Chromatic Number of the Plane: The Problem.- Chromatic Number of the Plane: An Historical Essay.- Polychromatic Number of the Plane and Results Near the Lower Bound.- De Bruijn-Erd?s Reduction to Finite Sets and Results Near the Lower Bound.- Polychromatic Number of the Plane and Results Near the Upper Bound.- Continuum of 6-Colorings of the Plane.- Chromatic Number of the Plane in Special Circumstances.- Measurable Chromatic Number of the Plane.- Coloring in Space.- Rational Coloring.- Coloring Graphs.- Chromatic Number of a Graph.- Dimension of a Graph.- Embedding 4-Chromatic Graphs in the Plane.- Embedding World Records.- Edge Chromatic Number of a Graph.- Carsten Thomassen's 7-Color Theorem.- Coloring Maps.- How the Four-Color Conjecture Was Born.- Victorian Comedy of Errors and Colorful Progress.- Kempe-Heawood's Five-Color Theorem and Tait's Equivalence.- The Four-Color Theorem.- The GreatDebate.- How Does One Color Infinite Maps? A Bagatelle.- Chromatic Number of the Plane Meets Map Coloring: Townsend-Woodall's 5-Color Theorem.- Colored Graphs.- Paul Erd?s.- De Bruijn-Erd?s's Theorem and Its History.- Edge Colored Graphs: Ramsey and Folkman Numbers.- The Ramsey Principle.- From Pigeonhole Principle to Ramsey Principle.- The Happy End Problem.- The Man behind the Theory: Frank Plumpton Ramsey.- Colored Integers: Ramsey Theory Before Ramsey and Its AfterMath.- Ramsey Theory Before Ramsey: Hilbert's Theorem.- Ramsey Theory Before Ramsey: Schur's Coloring Solution of a Colored Problem and Its Generalizations.- Ramsey Theory before Ramsey: Van der Waerden Tells the Story of Creation.- Whose Conjecture Did Van der Waerden Prove? Two Lives Between Two Wars: Issai Schur and Pierre Joseph Henry Baudet.- Monochromatic Arithmetic Progressions: Life After Van der Waerden.- In Search of Van der Waerden: The Early Years.- In Search of Van der Waerden: The Nazi Leipzig, 1933-1945.- In Search of Van der Waerden: The Postwar Amsterdam, 1945166.- In Search of Van der Waerden: The Unsettling Years, 1946-1951.- Colored Polygons: Euclidean Ramsey Theory.- Monochromatic Polygons in a 2-Colored Plane.- 3-Colored Plane, 2-Colored Space, and Ramsey Sets.- Gallai's Theorem.- Colored Integers in Service of Chromatic Number of the Plane: How O'Donnell Unified Ramsey Theory and No One Noticed.- Application of Baudet-Schur-Van der Waerden.- Application of Bergelson-Leibman's and Mordell-Faltings' Theorems.- Solution of an Erd?s Problem: O'Donnell's Theorem.- Predicting the Future.- What If We Had No Choice?.- A Glimpse into the Future: Chromatic Number of the Plane, Theorems and Conjectures.- Imagining the Real, Realizing the Imaginary.- Farewell to the Reader.- Two Celebrated Problems.