Edited by Timothy Gowers with associate editors June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader, it has been noted for the high caliber of its contributors.

[2][4][7] It is organized into eight parts:[4][5][6][7][10] Despite its length, the range of topics included is selective rather than comprehensive: some important established topics such as diophantine approximation are omitted, transcendental number theory, differential geometry, and cohomology get short shrift, and the most recent frontiers of research are also generally not included.

[6] The book's authors have attempted to keep their work accessible by forgoing abstraction and technical nomenclature as much as possible and by making heavy use of concrete examples and illustrations.

[2][4] Other contributors include Fields medalists Michael Atiyah, Alain Connes, Charles Fefferman, and Terence Tao, and well-known mathematicians Noga Alon, George Andrews, Béla Bollobás, John P. Burgess, Kevin Buzzard, Clifford Cocks, Ingrid Daubechies, Persi Diaconis, Jordan Ellenberg, Oded Goldreich, Andrew Granville, Jeremy Gray, Frank Kelly, Sergiu Klainerman, Jon Kleinberg, János Kollár, Peter Lax, Dusa McDuff, Barry Mazur, Carl Pomerance, Eleanor Robson, Peter Sarnak, Madhu Sudan, Clifford Taubes, and Avi Wigderson.

Among the historians who contributed to it are Charles C. Gillispie, Ivor Grattan-Guinness, Jeremy Gray, Niccolò Guicciardini, Ulf Hashagen, Eberhard Knobloch, Karen Hunger Parshall, Eleanor Robson, and Erhard Scholz.