Excursions in Mathematics
I found this book somewhat interesting, although most of the content was pretty basic. This kind of book is good for background facts in mathematics; stuff that you never really need to know, but might be interesting for a conversation with a mathematician at some point.
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The Golden Ratio
This is one of your standard math-popularization books, but it is a pretty interesting one at least. I liked the parts that provided interesting facts about the golden ratio and the fibonacci sequence. However, there was also a lot of garbage about the golden ratio in art, which basically amounted to saying that the golden […]
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A New Kind of Science
Wolfram seems to be pretty self-absorbed. I have to give him a lot of credit for his part in the creation of Mathematica, which is an excellent piece of software, but he writes this giant book that is really just a summary of observations of cellular automata and tries to hype it up to be […]
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Archimedes’ Revenge
I thought this book was alright. It contained a bunch of interesting topics in pure mathematics. It seemed almost like a tour through the author’s personal interests since it felt quite diverse. It goes through perfect/prime number theory, Penrose tilings, cryptography, and even quantitative political science.
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Infinity and the Mind
Rudy Rucker, though often known for his science fiction, has compiled an impressive entertainment/education type book about the nature of infinity. It offers the predominant views on the subject with explanations for why they are accepted in such a way. There is significant focus on the understanding of infinities and formal systems that use infinities. […]
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Excursions in Geometry
Geometry is a bit harder to read since you must refer to diagrams frequently, making it much slower. The spirit of this book was fairly good still, and it flowed pretty smoothly, though not as well as Excursions in Number Theory. Some of the topics that are looked into are not obviously important, so it […]
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Excursions in Number Theory
I must say that this is one of the best books I have ever read. It is rare that an author of a mathematical book can make the text flow so smoothly and have all the math be so clear. There are explanations of complex ideas that are so clear they barely even cause you […]
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The Mathematical Experience
After reading this book you get a feel for what the mathematical world is really like. Most of the time learning about mathematics only consists of hearing the developments that the past has made, but the psychology of a mathematician is not understood until you try to be a mathematician yourself. Mathematical discoveries don’t always […]
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Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
A masterpiece of mathematical writing, Godel, Escher, Bach is one of the most enjoyable books one can read. The amount of work, planning, and thought that must have went into the creation of this book is unimaginable. There are so many layers of depth to the writings that one could spend a very long time […]
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The Knot Book
This is one of those books that you can actually learn math from without trying too hard. The explanations were clear enough that I understood most of the material even though I did not do any of the exercises. I feel like I got a fairly thorough introduction to the mathematical theory of knots. The […]
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