For the younger, less-motivated child: "Mathematics: A Human Endeavor"
... so probably not good for this kid, but always worth mentioning in the context of awesome math books.
Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?
171–180 of 194 posts
Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?
#172Some of the books that you mention seem a bit too hard for a teen, so you have to be careful not to demotivate them by expecting too much of them; instead i suggest a simpler approach before tackling the big ones; * Functions and Graphs by Gelfand et al. - A small but great book to develop intuition. * Who is Fourier? A Mathematical Adventure - A great "manga type" book to build important concepts from first principl…
Another vote for Ian Stewart's book, or any other of his books. I discovered them at the end of high school and devoured them during the summer before college.
Did I just admit I was a nerd? Tough. I'm proud of it.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?
#173I would second the recommendation for Who is Fourier? A Mathematical Adventure. It's an unusual and engaging introduction to waves, Fourier coefficients, and transforms. The slope is gentle but not dumbed down.
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Fourier-Mathematical-Adventure-2n....
Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?
#174"The Annotated Turing" by Christian Petzold made a huge impression on me around that age. It doesn't discuss analysis but it gives a nice walkthrough of Turing's classic paper where he introduces the Turing machine and uses it to solve the decidability problem of Diophantine equations. Also, "Street Fighting Mathematics" from the MIT press
The author's name is "Charles Petzold" and yes "The Annotated Turing" is a great book.
All of Petzold's books are excellent, in particular; "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" should be read by everybody to understand how Computers really work.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?
#175Informal math book called An Infinitely large Napkin is amazing for fun math
Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?
#176During the first year of my undergrad someone introduced me to Gödel, Escher, Bach. I thought it was mind blowing at the time and still find it to be an incredible introduction to formal systems, thinking mathematically and understanding the concept of proofs. All these concepts are central to higher level mathematics, and are not covered in high school (at least not the Danish one). I'm was very thankful for that in…
Here's an interesting review: https://journal.infinitenegativeutility.com/why-i-dont-love-... It's a negative review, and I agree with all its points. In addition, I don't like Hofstadter's proof of Gödel's theorem - it's so LONG that it's hard to keep track of the parts. (The best proof of Gödel's theorem I've come across was given verbally by John Conway, and he had the opposite strategy - make the proof as brief a…
Do you have a link to Conways proof?
Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?
#177The university track will already put him on rails for a while. I believe your instinct on the encyclopedia should be followed because he should gain breadth early on to be sure that he has enough insight not to prematurely specialize.
It depends on your budget, but I would recommend the 10-volume set of “Encyclopaedia of Mathematics” (spelled just like that), which is a translation of the Soviet mathematics version. I have found that this is the resource I turn to when I want to quickly explore some new area of mathematics.
Because there are many books with this title, I will link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Encyclopaedia-Mathematics-Michiel-Haz...
Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?
#178Not a book recommendation but maybe applied math or probability/statistics towards investing or AI/ML. A fast feedback loop can do wonders for learning.
oraclerank.com kaggle.com
Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?
#179Why not give them all, in a handy pdf or e-pub format? ;)
Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?
#180I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned An Infinitely Large Napkin by Evan Chen [1]. It's a fantastic, very dense primer and overview of a large variety of university-level topics in mathematics. It was originally targeted at high school students with an interest in higher mathematics, and while the later chapters have strayed somewhat from that goal, one of the best things about Napkin is that it does its best to jus…
Thanks for alerting me to Evan Chen, what a wonderful person and skilled mathematical educator!