Do you have any special math books that you hold close to your heart because of the value they delivered specifically to you and your mathematical thinking and skills?
Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
1–10 of 323 posts
Re: Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
#2A book of abstract algebra - Charles C. Pinter. Each chapter is a few pages of explanation, and the rest you solve yourself by doing exercises that introduce aspects of the theory step by step.
Re: Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
#3Statistics by Freedman, Pisani and Purves. Don't know if I got better but loved the real world examples and cartoons. Does not have too many pre-requisites. Each section presents a tiny concept which is followed by plenty of exercises that have answers at the end. The furthest I got in a book in recent days, Math or not.
Re: Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
#4Calculus on Manifolds by Spivak. Brilliant. And relatively thin too.
Re: Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
#5Not a book. But a course by Prof Keith Devlin on Coursera called Introduction to Mathematical Thinking.
Re: Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
#6I would not call myself great at math – I struggled with it in school, in fact – but in recent years I’ve begun “correcting” my lack of mathematical knowledge. The single best decision I’ve made is to first start with the philosophy of mathematics. Maybe it’s because my background is in philosophy, but I also think that for certain people like myself, understanding what math is makes me far more interested in understanding how it works, rather than just doing context-less calculations using formulas I don’t know the history or deeper purpose of. When I learned math in school, it was entirely cut off from any of these deeper questions.
Here’s a good starting point for philosophy of mathematics :
Re: Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
#7Also, Geometry for Programmers but only because I wrote it. I had to update my skills significantly while gathering material and doing all the experiments. Not sure if reading the book would have the same effect :-)
Re: Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
#8Measure and Category by John Oxtoby. This book studies duality results between different notions of "small" sets in measure theory and topology. It's the first (and to some extent the only) math book where things just clicked and I didn't feel like I was drowning in a sea of notation and ideas. Here are some more thoughts on it: https://bcmullins.github.io/Top-Books-2019.
Re: Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
#9Any good book about the history of mathematics that will teach you a natural historical development of concepts to reach more generalizations.
History of mathematics will give you a very subtle entry into the minds of mathematicians and the motivation behind their theorems.
This will surely make you more appreciative of subjects and concepts you are learning.
Re: Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
#10Calculus Made Easy and Probability Through Problems. I'm not sure that I'd have gotten through either my university Calculus courses or Probability and Statistics without these two books. I used them as supplementary material to the course textbooks and homework. They both have a style that is approachable and helped me build an intuition for the material unlike anything else I found.