Mathematical Book Reviews

The Book Review Column edited by William Gasarch seems to include a rather large proportional of books that, given a suitable undergraduate-level background, a person can hope simply to enjoy. A person can hope to grow with them, rather than climb them. I look forward to flipping through these reviews to see, will I indeed enjoy this or that?

Now, I have read only a small portion of math books. But, Protter and Morrey, Dummit and Foote, books by Strang, books by Rudin? Isn't this quite a different category? Sure, many mathematical books are books we should note, books we should collect, books we should teach. If you are the kind of person who sits around chewing and digesting such books, congratulations. But then, haven't you probably read all the reviews that you need already?

Edit: Whoops! Now I think that my perception is quite biased because a) many books that he reviews don't require much more than excellent high-school mathematics skills and b) I personally enjoy math books more that are more closely related to computation. Gasarch's book review column is written for SIGACT, ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory. Still, my point was that this list of math books is not so much like some other lists of math books.

Re: Mathematical Book Reviews

#5

Post by VLM » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 10:27 PM UTC

minopret wrote: post #4

The Book Review Column edited by William Gasarch seems to include a rather large proportional of books that, given a suitable undergraduate-level background, a person can hope simply to enjoy. A person can hope to grow with them, rather than climb them. I look forward to flipping through these reviews to see, will I indeed enjoy this or that? Now, I have read only a small portion of math books. But, Protter and Morre…

I think the authors opinion is interesting. I looked up the review for Analytic Combinatorics and the author suggests going into some depth would take about three semesters. The Coursera MOOC is of course six weeks long and probably not in as much depth. Interesting.