With summertime underway, I thought I would share a list of 12 mathematical books that I’ve been reading between the beginning of this year and now. Some of them are absolutely excellent titles, but I’d say that each of the books listed was interesting and worth recommending.
I bought some of these books, others were sent to me as evaluation copies for my consideration. I plan to devote detailed reviews to my very favorites in the coming months. Here, I’m simply going to list all my math-related reading up to mid-2009, for those of you who’d like to check it out.
Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry
Mathematicians: An Outer View of the Inner World
Euler’s Gem: The Polyhedron Formula and the Birth of Topology
The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg
The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World’s Most Astonishing Number
The Mathematical Mechanic: Using Physical Reasoning to Solve Problems
Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry
Modeling with Data: Tools and Techniques for Scientific Computing
Probability, Markov Chains, Queues, and Simulation: The Mathematical Basis of Performance Modeling
Prime-Detecting Sieves. (LMS-33) (London Mathematical Society Monographs)
The best math book I read this year is the one about Gamma: https://www.amazon.com/Gamma-Exploring-Constant-Princeton-Science/dp/0691099839
What makes it so great is that it’s a “popular” math book, but it doesn’t pull any punches. There are some really challenging formulae in there, sewn together with a compelling narrative.
I’m impressed. Thanks!
I’ve been trying to get through Roger Penrose’s “Road to Reality”, with a slight detour thru “Flatterland” and “Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel”. Your list just increased the length of that detour, so… thanks, I guess 🙂
Wow, those books all look very interesting. Oh, so much to learn, so little time to do so.
Seems to be great.
For us who have almost forgot math, an enterteining way to warm up is Peter M. Higgins’ Mathematics for the Curious (Oxford University Press, 1998).