James Roy Newman was a mathematician and mathematical historian.
He was the editor of the anthology The World of Mathematics: A small library of the literature of mathematics from A'h-mosé the Scribe to Albert Einstein, presented with commentaries and notes (1956), which contains exactly what it claims to. The four volume series covers many branches of mathematics and represents a 15 year effort by Newman to collect what he felt were the most important essays in the field. With essays ranging from a biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan by Newman to Bertrand Russell's Definition of a Number, the series is often praised as suitable for any level of mathematical skill.
Newman also wrote Gödel's Proof (1958) with Ernest Nagel, presenting the main results of Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the mathematical work and philosophies leading up to its discovery in a more accessible manner. This book inspired Douglas Hofstadter to take up the study of mathematical logic, write his famous book Gödel, Escher, Bach, and prepare a second edition of Gödel's Proof, published in 2002.
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