Math Books
"Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state." When given the choice between chocolate and a math book, I've been known to hesitate. The selections below are pure pleasure! Real Mathematical Analysis A wonderful, readable Rudin alternative. Be sure to try your hand at Chapter 2's Exercise 130. It's the best homework problem, ever. And even starred for difficulty! Uncle Petros & Goldbach's Conjecture Crazy, anti-social mathematicians are people too! A (thankfully fictional) witty account of a brilliant number theorist who spends his life trying to beat an unsolved problem. The Knot Book Didja know that the first interest in knots came from chemists like Lord Kelvin in the 1800s who proposed that perhaps atoms were knots in the ether? They went to work tabulating tables of knots by trial and error, but dropped the subject like a hot potato once Michelson and Morley showed that oops, there was no ether to have knots in. So then the mathematicians got interested and have played around with it some ever since. The ironic part, though, is that in the 1980s knotting was discovered in DNA molecules and various synthesized molecules, affecting the chemical properties in important ways -- so now the chemists are interested again! Silly chemists. They should all be mathematicians instead. Introduction to Graph Theory A delightful, slim little introductory text full of jokes and musings on How To Do Math. Prove the five-color theorem! Fantasia Mathematica A collection of short stories and poetry about mathematics and mathematicians. Aldous Huxley's "Young Archimedes" is especially excellent, and there's even a sizable collection of math limericks. Div, Grad, Curl and All That Yeah, I don't remember vector calculus either. But this book does! Presents the concepts in the context of applications to electricity and magnetism, which is the way God intended. Introduction to the Theory of Computation Okay, so computation theory isn't strictly math, except it sort of is. This is such a wonderful book, though, that you won't care: extremely clear and well-written, on a fascinating subject. Home | Personal | Fun Physics | Marvelous Math | Other Stuff |