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Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#51

Post by jlees »

justlearning wrote: post #33

Thanks HN, Many times a rhetorical question is answered in ways more than i can ask for. I have few attributes that I suspect are behind my depression. This being one of them. I have been doing the same- but unlike the OP and others, I get depressed that I bought a book and by not reading it completely, I didn't give its due. I take it very personally that I have Cormen's Algorithms and not gone past chapter1. It's l…

The throne method is surprisingly good! An ex-boyfriend of mine was a hacker (well.. most of them have been) and one of his peculiarities was to have a vast collection of academic and O'Reilly books next to the loo. Great for flicking through, though often one would end up spending far too much time in there...

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#52

Post by psyklic »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #27

I was a theoretical physicist for 13 years, and struggled a lot with this question. I found it very useful to develop several different styles for reading mathematics and physics. Mostly I did this in the context of reading papers, not books, but the comments below are easily adapted to books. One unusual but very useful style was to set a goal like reading 15 papers in 3 hours. I use the term "reading" here in an un…

I think that especially with the Internet not bounding paper lengths any longer, authors should write more comprehensive versions of their papers (or at least include an appendix).

In most cases, the succintness of the papers is what makes them difficult to read, both in terms of skipping steps in proofs and in terms of hidden assumptions of the reader's knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#53

Post by modelic »

I read all the main theorems without even reading any of the definitions and examples for the first pass while at the same time I write down any questions I have with a reference to the theorem it pertains. For my second pass I go back and look at the examples to see if they answer any of the questions I wrote down and write down more questions referencing the examples. For the first two passes I don't try to answer any questions. I simply try to engage the material. Finally I try to answer all the unanswered questions and work some of the exercises and write down more questions if there are any left.

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#54

Post by Elcho »

jlees wrote: post #50
plinkplonk wrote: post #8

In my student days, before I became a working programmer, I was desperately poor and couldn't afford all the books I wanted to buy. So I got into the habit of buying books when I had money in my account to avoid a future in which I have to look longingly at a book and not have money to buy it. So, yes your "buying a book and reading a few years later" situation is something i am familiar with. So anyways, I ended up…

I studied computer science using Cormen et al., and it struck me that this might be one way to 'use' these oft-impenetrable tomes. (Though I really found Cormen very accessible.) Look around for a university course that teaches using the book, and see if you can find notes, or - better - problems based on the text. Often gives you a sense of where to begin with the larger books.

You can get podcasts based on this book, from the MIT's itunes page; MIT 6.046J introduction to algorithms.

Its not quite as good as seeing it on the page but it might help if your out for a walk or in the car.

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#55

Post by zkz »

justlearning wrote: post #33

Thanks HN, Many times a rhetorical question is answered in ways more than i can ask for. I have few attributes that I suspect are behind my depression. This being one of them. I have been doing the same- but unlike the OP and others, I get depressed that I bought a book and by not reading it completely, I didn't give its due. I take it very personally that I have Cormen's Algorithms and not gone past chapter1. It's l…

Glad to know it helped you, thank you!

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#56

Post by scscsc »

aheilbut wrote: post #46
scscsc wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you? Care to explain why you are suprized ?

Well, I think such a book would be useful, and strikes me as a pretty obvious idea, with plenty of analogies in related areas (ie. zoomable user interfaces; code folding). Currently, if you are reading math and hit something you don't understand, you can refer to other references (which may not use the same notation or approach things in quite the same way), and/or try to work out the details yourself, or get help fr…

For what it's worth, we've already got wikipedia which does math pretty well. Even though it doesn't have the fancy-sounding zoomable user interface (which imho suck w.r.t. usability), it does offer plain old, get this, hypertext, which allows you to perform further exploration.

As for your idea, I don't want to minimalize it [because well, with ideas, you never know for sure which ones are good and which ones are bad (w.r.t. how successful they are) until after they are deployed], but it seems to me it would be a lot of work, with an end-result that might be totally crap usability-wise, and of limited interest to a large part of the population. Plus it would (for the moment) require a computer to read it. And computers suck as devices to read books on.

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#57

Post by jasidles »

psyklic wrote: post #52
michael_nielsen wrote: post #27

I was a theoretical physicist for 13 years, and struggled a lot with this question. I found it very useful to develop several different styles for reading mathematics and physics. Mostly I did this in the context of reading papers, not books, but the comments below are easily adapted to books. One unusual but very useful style was to set a goal like reading 15 papers in 3 hours. I use the term "reading" here in an un…

I think that especially with the Internet not bounding paper lengths any longer, authors should write more comprehensive versions of their papers (or at least include an appendix). In most cases, the succintness of the papers is what makes them difficult to read, both in terms of skipping steps in proofs and in terms of hidden assumptions of the reader's knowledge.

Psyklic, our UW QSE group felt the same way, and to remedy these problems we wrote a 96-page "Practical Recipes" article on quantum simulation, which appeared this month in the (open source) New Journal of Physics.

This length permitted our QSE Group to explain practical methods for quantum system engineering at a mathematical level that was well-matched to our quantum system engineering students.

On the other hand, the peer review of articles of this length is a lot of extra work for all concerned---reviewers, editors, and authors ... to say nothing of the effort demanded of the readers.

Re: Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

#58

Post by [deleted] »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #27

I was a theoretical physicist for 13 years, and struggled a lot with this question. I found it very useful to develop several different styles for reading mathematics and physics. Mostly I did this in the context of reading papers, not books, but the comments below are easily adapted to books. One unusual but very useful style was to set a goal like reading 15 papers in 3 hours. I use the term "reading" here in an un…

[deleted]
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