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Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?

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

#141

Post by shaunxcode »

0-ary wrote: post #139

If I could give my high school self only one math book, it would have to be Seven Sketches in Compositionality by Fong and Spivak. Did every exercise over winter break in college and realized along the way that I had been hustling through math courses and olympiad problems without appreciating any beauty in the structure of mathematics. It completely changed my life and, at least in my eyes, dissolved the assumption…

link to read online: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.05316.pdf

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

#145

Post by 3PS »

I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned An Infinitely Large Napkin by Evan Chen [1]. It's a fantastic, very dense primer and overview of a large variety of university-level topics in mathematics. It was originally targeted at high school students with an interest in higher mathematics, and while the later chapters have strayed somewhat from that goal, one of the best things about Napkin is that it does its best to justify why we introduce certain ideas and abstractions. Generally, it tries to give a high-level overview without sacrificing technical rigor. I highly recommend it.

Plus, it's a free PDF on the internet! Doesn't get better than that.

[1] https://web.evanchen.cc/napkin.html

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

#148

Post by jtolmar »

Discrete Mathematics with Applications by Susanna S. Epp. is one of my favorite textbooks. Discrete math is considered a sophomore-level college subject, but it's really not that challenging, and the textbook is extremely thorough and understandable.

Discrete math is also orthogonal to typical math curricula so it's unlikely to be redundant to anything they've already learned or will learn.

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

#149

Post by scott_russell »

Introduction to Logic: And to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences, by Alfred Tarski. One of my favorite math books, which convinced to pursue an undergrad in math. Being an intro logic book it's completeley self-contained and may not not even feel like a math book, but yet a great intro into foundational stuff.
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