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Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?

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Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?

#1
I'm looking for recommendations for a maths book for a bright, self-motivated child in their late teens who is into maths (mainly analysis) at upper high-school / early undergrad level.

It would be a birthday gift, so ideally something that is more than a plain textbook, but which also has depth, and maybe broadens their view of maths beyond analysis. I'm thinking something along the lines of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, Spivak's Calculus, or Moor & Mertens The Nature of Computation.

What would you have appreciated having been given at that age?

Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?

#7
I bought it, but I only read a chapter of it, after seeing it in a bookstore. Nonetheless:

Mrs. Perkins's Electric Quilt: And Other Intriguing Stories of Mathematical Physics by Paul J. Nahin

It sounds like it's at about the right difficulty/knowledge level, and it has interesting stuff, isn't a boring textbook.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?

#8
"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

Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?

#9
First read https://artofproblemsolving.com/news/articles/avoid-the-calc...

By one of my early mathematics tutors in San Diego math circle

Then buy something like: Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics (3rd Edition) (Featured Titles for Transition to Advanced Mathematics) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321797094/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_K4...

Re: Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?

#10

First read https://artofproblemsolving.com/news/articles/avoid-the-calc... By one of my early mathematics tutors in San Diego math circle Then buy something like: Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics (3rd Edition) (Featured Titles for Transition to Advanced Mathematics) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321797094/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_K4...

Also art of problem solving vols 1-2 are now classics for that age.
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