I'm looking for fun or enlightening pop-mathematics books. I want to learn the concepts behind mathematics without having to deal with all of the needless equations and impenetrable jargon of endless variables.
I've already read The Joy of X, and I liked it very much.
ePubs, if possible, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Just read a real math book please.
Could I get some recs? I was kind of trying to avoid textbooks because they're so awful...
Sheldon Axler - Precalculus
I don't know what exactly you want to get out of maths if it's not "the knowledge of mathematical structures".
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Well, it's the difference of learning mathematical structures through a boring format, and _exploring_ said structures in a way that is interesting and feels relevant to the world around us, something that sort of injects life into the monotony of simple textbook mathematics. I thought Strogatz's book did it very well.
bump
>maths itself isn't fun enough i need wacky distractions XD
Why do you think insulting your crack dealer is a good idea?
It's not a textbooks fault if you lack the capactiy to enjoy math in itself.
So what you're saying is you don't know of anything.
I don't want to read the dictionary, I want to read literature.
Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory
A lot of Ian Stewart's books too. Like God Does Not Play Dice or w/e it's called.
How to lie with statistics was fun too.
I remember reading a wiki article for this really old british book, i think from the 1900's or 1800's, dont remember, but like some guy gets transported to a different dimension where everyone is a triangle or a square or something and actually the book was a commentary on the British class system.
By the way, i forget the name of the book >:)
James Gleick's 'Chaos Theory' is an interesting read.
Just read Bourbaki, it covers all the maths basics in like 7 volumes or so.
>Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym under which a group of (mainly French) 20th-century mathematicians, with the aim of reformulating mathematics on an extremely abstract and formal but self-contained basis, wrote a series of books beginning in 1935. With the goal of grounding all of mathematics on set theory, the group strove for rigour and generality. Their work led to the discovery of several concepts and terminologies still used, and influenced modern branches of mathematics.
Fascinating
Flatland, more an allegory about British social structure than anything to do with math, but is kinda neat.
Square place
If we're going to mention flatland we may as well throw in some Lewis Carroll too with his Alice books
Thanks!
No that's not what I'm saying idiot.
lewis carroll's books on games and logic are top notch, if you don't want to read fantasy. if you want more logic games and fantasy smullyan's alice in puzzleland etc are all good.
john d barrow has some pop-sci stuff around infinity and zero etc.
you could start with the greeks because euclid's geometry is really pretty, but they're usually most picture books.
This book is a nice intro to "getting" mathematics, imo.
Then post what you know.
Wallace's meme on infinity
I heard it got bad reviews.
Pic related was a nice intro to some of the more modern concepts (ie. the reals and their construction) for me.
Why?
>smullyan
Good stuff.
He's inaccurate in parts, and I don't think his style is suited for pop science. Maybe if you're already a huge DFW you may enjoy it.
Critics really railed him for his "inaccuracy" and said that he should stick with fiction.
I would start with this
That looks difficult.
First of all fuck all these pseudo-intellectual dweebs on a mongolian loli board telling you to "read a real math book u fokin pleb" because they don't actually understand what you're asking and wanna' sound smart.
Second, Everything and More by none other than meme master DFW.
Whole book is about the concept of infinity and it's application in real world maths. Traces the history of its founding, from Xeno's Dichotomy, to the Divine Brotherhood of Pythagoros, to Newton and Leibniz, to Cantor and Godel.
Good stuff.
I'll give it a shot. Memes aside, I actually like DFW. Thanks, friend.
I really enjoyed it. I'm a graduate student in math (but not analysis) and was at that point already a huge fan of Wallace.
His style is pretty strong in it, so you sort of have to be a fan. That said, I think the egregiousness of his math inaccuracies has been pretty overstated considering the intended audience. I think it does what it's supposed to do, which is make the math interesting and accessible for laymen. If you want all the details, read a real math book.
Please don't rec this book. It's absolute fucking garbage. DFW has a calculus 1 understanding of mathematics and it shows.
elaborate you contrarian little shit. DFW has a degree in modal logic, if you think his mathematics is limited to calc 1, you've obviously never read the book.
>thehowlingfantods.com
>an error every 2 pages
Oh, you can start with this then
That also looks difficult.
jesus, this fucking thread. Veeky Forums should really stop trying to be clever about science and stuff. what an embarrassment.
OP the book you are looking for is pic related.
also, flatland
This looks good! What level of mathematics is taught in the book? Because I honestly have a better understanding of mathematics than most people even though I haven't done it since high school.
It's called a meme kiddo. Nobody is learning topology and tensors without a strong understanding of multivariable calculus, which I am sure you don't have.
>It's called a meme kiddo.
Good grief, could you actually be any more cringeworthy?
any Terence Tao book
/thread
You're reading sparknotes not literature.
College textbooks are written poorly, and don't classify as literature.
>not understanding how a metaphor works
My point still stands.
So what is mathematical literature?
Nobody is learning wombulations and flimflabs without a strong understanding of dopapatics, which I am sure you don't have.
Damn. I still might read it, though, just because it was written by DFW.
studying Rudin right now as a supplementary text for my Analysis course this summer. not bag.
you know the drill: start with the greeks. Euclid, Diophantus, and Apollonius to begin with.
Recently bought pic related. I plan to start it as soon as I finish one of the books I'm currently on. Any here read it and care to share an opinion on it?
I just looked over the summary on Amazon and it looks really interesting. I'd also like to know if it's worth a read.
>stem
>human
Check out Code by Charles Petzold.
There's a meme in society of some kind of entrepreneurial post-capitalist industrial-scientific "productivity" thing, and they are expressing the meme because they are demi-conscious memebuoys floating on a slurry sea of currents you can only see if you zoom out
It's exhausting even trying to give an answer to this question. You need to like phenomenologically bracket every single word and write a book explaining that they aren't even people. They aren't even conscious. They aren't even having "opinions". STEM people are like robots with human skin stretched over them. To say "they are dismissive of the humanities" is implicitly to admit I think there's a "they". STEM people don't even fucking exist. They are a statistical gaseous nebula of random particles wafting across continents and periodically expressing junk they picked up along the way. Why would you even talk to them?
Talking to a STEMfag is literally like being some kind of Buddha, ascending reality, then coming back down and talking to bees who were dudes in past lives. I'm sure these bee niggas can be saved or whatever, but let's just wait until they're back in human form. Don't walk around going "BEES, STOP BUZZING, PUT DOWN THAT POLLEN, LISTEN TO ME ABOUT HOW EVERY CONCEPTUAL CATEGORY YOU HAVE FOR EVEN THINKING OF THINGS WAS SHAPED FOR YOU BY AN UNCONSCIOUS SLUDGE OF MEMETIC POLYALLOY THAT FLOWS IN PREDICTABLE CURRENTS FROM YEAR TO YEAR THROUGH THE HIVE IN WHICH YOU WERE CONCEIVED"
what's the point of math for an ordinary person? i see the point of basic coding (at least you can use it to estimate your chance to do something in a mmo running a monte-carlo simulation, lol), but of math... barely, except for the basics of statistics of course
Starting with algebraic topology instead of point-set? Disgusting. May I recommend
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>not starting with chromatic homotopy theory
kys, normie
this is frankly the best pasta I have ever tasted.
>what's the point of math for an ordinary person?
Because math is all around us. And so on and so forth.
How the fuck do you learn about mathematic without learning mathematics? Doesn't understanding the propositions expressed by mathematical equations require you to understand the equations?
You don't have to resort to equations to do maths. Academic mathematicians like it because it looks very rigorous when you have pages of equations. Also it's pretty good in preventing misunderstanding or misreading. But academic math is allergic to other valid representations of problems outside of some parts of teaching. You can do maths on a chess board. You can do it with straight edge and compass on a flat sandy beach. You can do it by connecting dots in different ways and so. And some people want to learn something about the field but don't like equations for whatever reason.
i don't think you know much about mathematics
It really isn't. He cribs a phrase from Terminator 2, and his three basic ideas ( only modern capitalist logic vindicates STEM as relevant , recommending a math book is an over-wrought philosophical problem because I say it is , STEMfags are inferior ), all false by the way, are only very loosely roped together. His "they" of the first paragraph is never perfectly clarified, although context gives us a few good guesses. Because he's affecting the prose of a schizophrenic teenager who is trying his absolute best to sound smart.
OP, your attitude towards math is completely wrong, but try Berlinski's A Tour of The Calcluus. Pop-book or "real" text, if you're unwilling to try some exercises on your own (and complete them) related to what you're reading, then there's really no point in reading any math book. Otherwise you'll just get a gloss of the content, not really understand it, and then you'll be at a party sometime and someone will mention x and you'll spout off, not even realizing how twee and stupid you sound. In a word, you will be reddit.
And no one wants to be reddit.
>and then you'll be at a party sometime and someone will mention x
Is blabbering about maths at parties not cringe anymore?
>Because he's affecting the prose of a schizophrenic teenager who is trying his absolute best to sound smart.
>OP, your attitude towards math is completely wrong,
I think amazon.com
No it doesn't.
This exactly.
You sound interested in your idea of mathematics, rather than mathematics.
It's only cringe if you don't know what you're talking about
Selfish bump hoping for a response to my question here:
I have taken Calculus up to Differential Equations. Can somebody confirm this as being a good introduction to Topology?
The Road to Reality by Penrose
It's unbelievably enlightening, even with a math background.
Munkres' Topology is super accessible with the background you mention.
Seconding . Munkres is widely regarded as a really good intro to topology.
bump for interest
Guy who posted Munkres' earlier. Tbh, before getting into point set topology I'd recommend learning some intro to real analysis stuff. It gives you a specific topology to think about (metric topology on \mathbb{R}) which makes the abstract way less mystifying. But Munkres was my intro to topology book that I took concurrently with into to real analysis a couple years ago and it served me well
The Millennium Problems has a pretty good overview of several different areas of math, and has very good intros to calculus, topology and group theory while it explains the problems.