I finally got a copy of the Princeton Companion to Mathematics in my hands today, and within a depressingly (but not unexpectedly) short time found my first mistake, in an article written by me. I’ve established that small corrections can almost certainly be made in time for the next printing, so this post is to invite anybody who happens to spot an error to let me know in a comment on this post. (That way, all the corrections that are needed will be in one convenient place.) I’m particularly interested in mathematical mistakes, though typos are also good to know about. Just to get the ball rolling, here’s the one I spotted, together with a reflection on how it arose, since it’s relevant to mathematical writing in general.
Incidentally, before I say any more, I want to say that a huge amount of proofreading has gone into the book, so I expect the density of mistakes to be pretty small. But because the book is a big one, I also expect the number of mistakes to be not all that small.
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