Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning

I discovered Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers in the summer of 2003 at my local library. At the time I was a high school student taking a summer Algebra 2 class in order to be able to take calculus my senior year for college admissions purposes. This book instilled in me a love for mathematics, even if I sometimes struggled with the topic. Just a few hours ago my copy of Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning just arrived; I bought this book as a reference of undergraduate-level math concepts based on Hacker News recommendations since I'm right now in the process of reviewing undergraduate-level math to strengthen my understanding of deep learning fundamentals. I had the opportunity to glance through this book, and I wish I had discovered this book when I was in high school or during my undergraduate years; it appears to be an excellent, more technical companion to Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers.…

Some of the books that you mention seem a bit too hard for a teen, so you have to be careful not to demotivate them by expecting too much of them; instead i suggest a simpler approach before tackling the big ones; * Functions and Graphs by Gelfand et al. - A small but great book to develop intuition. * Who is Fourier? A Mathematical Adventure - A great "manga type" book to build important concepts from first principles * Concepts of Modern Mathematics by Ian Stewart - A nice overview in simple language. * Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning by Kolmogorov et al. - A broad but concise presentation of a lot of mathematics. * Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics by Richard Hamming - A very good applied maths book. All of Hamming's books are recommended. There are of course plenty more but the above should be good for understanding.

I can second this. An amazing volume. If you want more details, I'd stick with the Soviet math school, which was amazing in it's pedagogical soundness and user friendly texts. Anything from the EMS -- Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences -- is worth picking up.

- Rationality From AI to Zombies (huge collection of essays about (rationality,intelligence,quantum physics,bayesian probability,philosophy...) that can be read on lesswrong.com) -Intuition Pumps and other Thinking Tools -Sapiens -Edward.O Wilson Letters to a young scientist -Cédric Villani Birth of a Theorem -Emanuel Derman Models Behaving Badly -Letters From A Stoic by Seneca -Mathematics it's contents methods 3 Volumes (Aleksandrov et al.) -Nick Bostrom Superinteligence -The Moral Animal by Robert Wright

Books I'm glad I've read: The Inner Game of Tennis Impro by Keith Johnstone Seeing Like a State The Timeless Way of Building Linear and Geometric Algebra by Alan Macdonald Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (read this one thrice) The Tao of Pooh Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd The Drama of the Gifted Child Interaction Ritual What Do You Say After You Say Hello? Of niche use: Mathematics: its Content, Methods and Meaning - mostly useful for figuring out what math you don't know. I recommend reading it at a fairly decent pace, and noting what subjects don't sound like an overview of something you've already learned.

I just bought 4 books off of Amazon and got them today: Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning. Highly recommended overview of math by some HNers so I figured I would check it out. Venture capitalists at work. I didn't realize there were more "at work" series books other than coders and founders, so this one sounds right up my alley. Information Rules, a book that's supposedly dated on economics and how it applies to the internet world. Recommended on Chris Dixon's blog and looked interesting. Thought I might get some new insights to bitcoin or something with it. And Walter Isaacson's new book, the innovators.

Recently, I've been reading this mega book that covers a lot of advanced topics in math by Kolmogorov et al. It is nice because it covers a lot of topics w/o in a fairly short text --- it is a brick but it covers 2000 years of knowledge! http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning-Do... (http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning-Dover/dp/0486409163) For first-year stuff, I would recommend No bullshit guide to math and physics[1] and the No bullshit guide to linear algebra[2] of which I am the author. [1] http://minireference.com/ [2] http://gum.co/noBSLA