I found this book (again) after reading an excerpt written by H. L. Gold, who describes this book:

All this and much more I got from an overwhelming kind of book published by Simon & Schuster. The name of it is The World of Mathematics and it comes in four volumes, boxed, more that 2,500 stunning pages. Besides chapters on every sort of math proper, there are biographies of the greatest mathematicians, from Ah-mosé, the Egyptian scribe, to the present day - the flyleaf of the book says "To Einstein," but it goes beyond him.
If time travel existed, I can think of few worthier, or more predictably successful uses, than to send this book back half a century to the lonely, unloved genius of Madras. The world would benefit beyond imagination...