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Ask HN: Books that made you fascinated to learn more mathematics?

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Re: Ask HN: Books that made you fascinated to learn more mathematics?

#12

Post by motogpjimbo »

Reading a battered old second-hand copy of "Calculus Made Easy" by Silvanus P Thompson as a teenager was the first step on a path that eventually lead to me getting a degree in mathematics. Until then, I always thought calculus and other higher-level maths topics were out of reach for someone like me, but the explanations in that book were so careful and encouraging that it made me realise that anyone could study these topics with just a bit of effort. I believe the latest edition of the book has been updated to replace the slightly handwavy description of "infinitesimals" with a more rigorous limit-based foundation, but I don't know if the book's magic was lost as a result.

As an undergraduate, I purchased a cheap Dover reprint of "Ordinary Differential Equations" by Tenenbaum and Pollard to supplement an ODE course I was taking, mostly because it had lots of exercises in it. However, I found that book hugely inspiring, and it's become one of my favourite maths books ever. Amongst other things, it essentially has a complete course in Newtonian physics in it, just tossed off in the examples! Highly recommended. I eventually went on to study ODEs and PDEs at Masters level, partly as a result of enjoying that book so much.

Re: Ask HN: Books that made you fascinated to learn more mathematics?

#14

Post by psyc »

vmurthy wrote: post #10

As a dad to a 7 year old (and another one on the way :)) , I find the following books wonderful. They evoke wonder in me and hopefully I will be able to transmit some of this to the kids . 1. Euclid's Window 2. Music of the primes

The Phantom Tollbooth. I knew what a dodecahedron is years before the other kids, many of whom still don’t know.

Re: Ask HN: Books that made you fascinated to learn more mathematics?

#15

Post by rindalir »

Some "pop"-sci books that have inspired me:

1."Uncle Petros & Goldback's Conjecture" & "Logicomix" (both by Apostolos Doxiadis),

2."Chaos" by James Gleick,

3. "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" by Paul Hoffman

4. "A Mathematician's Apology" by G.H. Hardy

5. "The Indian Clerk" (fiction) by David Leavitt (about GH Hardy & Ramanujan)

6. "Genius at Play" by Siobhan Roberts (about John Conway). Normally I stay away from pop-math books with the words "The mind of..." or "Genius" in the title but this is a delightful book.

Some "actual" math books: 1. Nonlinear Dynamics & Chaos (Strogatz)

2. the Way of Analysis (Strichartz) -- note, this one is controversial as to its quality as a math book but I really like the presentation style

3. The Nature of Computation (Moore & Mertens)

Re: Ask HN: Books that made you fascinated to learn more mathematics?

#17

Post by btrettel »

Stanley Farlow's "Partial Differential Equations for Scientists and Engineers" is a great introduction to partial differential equations. That book was at exactly the right level for me when I was 19 to be introduced to a wide variety of things in differential equations in general.

Re: Ask HN: Books that made you fascinated to learn more mathematics?

#19

Post by lurker137 »

Men of Mathematics: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Mathematicians from Zeno to Poincaré

Reading about the personalities of mathematics really widened my perspective of the motivations behind the math and the wide range of people involved in pushing it forward. It’s what inspired me to learn math for fun in my free time

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Mathematics

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