  The present article surveys surreal numbers with an informal approach, from
their very first definition to their structure of universal real closed
analytic and exponential field. Then we proceed to give an overview of the
recent achievements on equipping them with a derivation, which is done by
proving that surreal numbers can be seen as transseries and by finding the
`simplest' structure of H-field, the abstract version of a Hardy field. All the
latter notions and their context are also addressed, as well as the
universality of the resulting structure for surreal numbers.
