The Joy of X
Many people take math in high school and promptly forget much of it. But math plays a part in all of our lives all of the time, whether we know it or not. In The Joy of x, Steven Strogatz expands on his hit New York Times series to explain the big ideas of math gently and clearly, with wit, insight, and brilliant illustrations. Whether he is illuminating how often you should flip your mattress to get the maximum lifespan from it, explaining just how Google searches the internet, or determining how many people you should date before settling down, Strogatz shows how math connects to every aspect of life. Discussing pop culture, medicine, law, philosophy, art, and business, Strogatz is the math teacher you wish you’d had. Whether you aced integral calculus or aren’t sure what an integer is, you’ll find profound wisdom and persistent delight in The Joy of x.
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- Related and a great read: "The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity" by Steven Strogatz:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13356649-the-joy-of-x
- Not that much ground covering, but you should listen to Steven Strogatz's podcasts - The Joy of x, and The Joy of Why!
- I am going to teach Computer Science to a group of young students, 20-30 motivated people aged 10-25 on a volunteer basis in my village without the experience of being a teacher. The task that I set for myself is to reveal to young people all the possible areas of computer science in 10-15 lessons and then divide them into smaller groups according to their interests, after which only occasionally monitor their progress. This set of lessons is going to be much broader than CS50, with much more demonstrating of electronic stuff, but with almost no homework. Because I suppose that no programming language should be mandatory to everyone but you know, everyone should know what is a bit, what is a code, and how long is a way of light travelling for one millisecond.
What should I watch out for in these classes that are aimed at everyone? What, on the contrary, is not worth mentioning despite the temptation? How early should I show things like: systems programming, functional programming, declarative programming? How much to give discrete mathematics? At what stage should I give Lisp, C, JavaScript or Python, Wolfram Alpha? What names do I need to mention besides Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Linus Torvalds and von Neumann? And last but not least, what should I do about the fact that I have never used smartphones (iPhone/Android) and I have no interest in them, when the vast majority of my students will only have such a "computer"?
Here are few books I am going to start from, but I have a strong feeling that a lot of CS topics are missing in the list:
Charles Petzold - Code (mandatory)
Paul Graham - Hackers and Painters (mandatory for younger students)
Alan Cooper - The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (mandatory)
Steven Strogatz - The Joy Of X (mandatory for younger students)
Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man-Month
Linus Torvalds - Just For Fun
https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ (mandatory for advanced students)
Don Knuth - TAoCP volume 1
SICP/The Land Of Lisp (?)
- * 'The Joy of X' by Steven Strogatz. I really like this book, on my second read now.
- Well never seems to dry up when topic(s) revolve around philosopher George Santayana's “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Dropping the "more impractical the topic" time frame dependency:
Now that there's GPT3 with google glasses, "Conquer Logical Fallacies: 28 Nuggets Of Knowledge To Nurture Your Reasoning Skills (Critical Thinking & Logic Mastery)" might seem impractical, unless viewed with a blue background.
"The Cathedral & The Bazaar" by Eric S Raymond
"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution " by Steven Levy
"The Soul of A New Machine" by Tracy Kidder
"Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science" by Harry Lewis
"Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" Charles Pezold
"The Gödelian Puzzle Book: Puzzles, Paradoxes and Proofs (Dover Math Games & Puzzles) " Raymond Smullyan
"UDEXIA: Interactive Escape Room Book - Puzzle Game Book - Play with Friends, Family or by Yourself" by RIDL
"Daedalian Depths: Unravel the clues and escape the labyrinth " by Raml Hansenne
"One Two Three . . . Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (Dover Books on Mathematics) " George Gamow
"The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity" by Steven Strogatz
"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadtler
"The Annotated Gödel: A Reader's Guide to his Classic Paper on Logic and Incompleteness" by Hal Prince
"The Language Lover's Puzzle Book : A World Tour of Languages and Alphabets in 100 Amazing Puzzles (Alex Bellos Puzzle Books) "
"To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan
- - Math with Bad Drawings by Ben Orlin
- Infinite Powers and The Joy of X by Steven Strogatz
- Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter
(Avoiding text books as one's mileage might vary, and having fun depends on the readers' levels as well.)
