Ask HN: Which mathematics books taught you the most in your career?

Statistics for six sigma quality control.

Definitely “Seven Sketches in Compositionality”! [1]

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[1] https://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp18/7Sketches.pdf

I was okay-ish reading it right after “Category Theory for Programmers” by Bartosz Milewski.

Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz

Professional mathematician (but in business, not academia). I hold a PhD in mathematical physics. Below the list of books that taught me the most. However, these books are often not directly related to my current work. Also, I don't think they will be useful for everyone, as some of them are strong specialized books. These books mostly taught me to think like a mathematician. One of the strongest skills I learned as a mathematician is to dive deep into a topic and learn almost everything that you can learn about it (going from 80% of knowledge to 99.9%). I "read" these books completely several times in my career.

* Atiyah, Macdonald - Introduction to Commutative Algebra.

* Bourbaki (in French).

* Gasper, Rahman - Basic Hypergeometric Functions.

* Hasti et al - Elements Of Statistical Learning.

* Rudin - Real & Complex Analysis.

* Thomas, Thomas - Elements of Information Theory.