One, two, three ... infinity
This wonderful book is an introduction to the relationship between mathematics and the physical world. It explains elements of quantum theory, relativity, and purer mathematics, in a way apprenendible by young or uninitiated readers. (It was a delightful eye-opener to many 8th graders, doomed to later become engineers and physists!)
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83% recommend17% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- I was going to say One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow, but that's not a textbook, so what stands out in my mind are the Feynmann Lectures.
When I started out in computing, think 8080 and 6502, there were basically no books. On the optics end, which eventually gave way to computing, probably Modern Optical Engineering, by Warren Smith.
- Also, George Gamow's work is exemplary in making complex ideas understandable.
See, for example:
>One, Two, Three... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (1947)
https://www.amazon.com/One-Two-Three-Infinity-Speculations/d...
PDF: https://archive.org/details/OneTwoThreeInfinity_158
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>Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory (1966)
https://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics/dp/04...
PDF: https://archive.org/details/ThirtyYearsThatShookPhysics-TheB...
- Also from Gamow, and something that blew my (then) 12 year old mind: 1-2-3-Infinity
- Probably One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow. Got me started, as well as a few others.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Two_Three..._Infinity
Name drops Neil deGrasse Tyson (Is he that old?)
Internet Archive has a 1961 copy.
https://ia801305.us.archive.org/19/items/OneTwoThreeInfinity...
The Nature of the Universe, by Fred Hoyle, as well.
- Here are a few popular science books:
If you want actual textbooks then maybe pick up a set theory textbook like "Naive set theory" by Halmos.One Two Three . . . Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science by George Gamow Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite by Rudy Rucker Yearning for the Impossible: The Surprising Truths of Mathematics by John Stillwell Roads to Infinity by John Stillwell - While this has some theoretical merit, IME, limits are quite useful to catch bugs (or prevent degenerate cases). For example I was recently working on a permissions system wherein there can be members of groups. I set a reasonable limit on the size of a group based on a maximum of actual usage and what I could foresee being reasonable. A few days later, this limit was triggered, and I got a bug report. But it turned out there was some bad caller that had essentially an infinite loop that was adding more and more members to the group. Without the limit this probably would only have detected after it cascaded and caused other failures.
As another example, Facebook famously had (maybe still has? I have no idea) a limit of 5,000 friends. This was based on the idea that you were supposed to be friends with people you actually kind of know at least a little bit, which would probably fit within 5,000 for most people. After some more popular users started hitting the limit, it led to the development of public profiles/pages as an alternative product to handle that use case. So in this case the limit allowed the company to identify a new market that they could better serve in an alternative way.
BTW, the George Gamow book that the name comes from (One, Two, Three… Infinity) is a great read for anyone interested in popular descriptions of physics or math. He also lived a very interesting life, I would recommend his autobiography "My World Line".
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