Name: Alice in puzzle-land
ISBN: 9780486482002

What Hacker News says

sargstuffNov 2023

What's the story angle/line/tanent/"e"/"pi"/etc.? (linear algegra, Lewis Carol math, Claud, Shannon, etc. ) -- Physical reminder/context for why 'booked ticket to get punched'?

Target audience? -- is journey a story in which 'instructions/learning' are actions used to get the reader to partake in story? aka humanities novel as wrapper to 70's wall of documentation volumes.

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> Should I just focus on creating the content and making sure it’s useful/valuable and treat the book as just another method of presentation?

Is this for a 'Go Forth' TeD book of the month talk?

Any further clarification on type theory / category background? (cs, art, architecture, fonts, LaTex, ascii, utf, ...)

"The Power of Making Thinking Visible: Practices to Engage and Empower All Learners" by Ron Ritchhart (Author), Mark Church (Author)

"The Elements of Style" by William Strunk Jr. (Author), E. B. White (Author)

"Thinking with Type: Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students Paperback" by Ellen Lupton

"Unleash the Power of Storytelling: Win Hearts, Change Minds, Get Results" by Rob Biesenbach

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> ... book just a nice to have thing? Wide variety of catecorical/topi types.

Physicall book can be less expensive / less hassel than mangaging drmo on elecronic tablet/format only to have reference auto-erased. Dont have to worry about battery leaking/exploding. Thankfully, electronic formats allow for circumventing the imaginary wierd mechanics of trying to carry around wall's worth of pearls within multiple physical book encylopedia volumes without spending one's life working out at gym to be able to effortlessly carry/handle the encylopedia volume(s).

Categorical/Topi 'sea' type stuff:

"Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carol;

"Alice in Puzzle-Land: A Carrollian Tale for Children Under Eighty" by Raymond M. Smullyan

"To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan;

"The New Turing Omnibus: Sixty-Six Excursions in Computer Science" by A.K. Dewdney

"Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing" by Martin Erwig

"The Annotated Gödel: A Reader's Guide to his Classic Paper on Logic and Incompleteness Paperback" by Hal Prince (Author)

"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R Hofstadter

"Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction (2nd Edition)" by James V Stone

"An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise" Subsequent Edition by John R. Pierce

"Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra through Applications to Computer Science" by Philip N. Klein

"Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!" by Conrad Barski M.D.

"Build Your Own Lisp" by Mr Daniel Holden

"LISP IS MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE IN LIFE FOUR MONTHS TO LEARN: Funny beginner's noteook to Learn LISP Programming Step-by-Step(PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE)"

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cpp_frogMar 2022

In high school I had a Philosophy class, and its book [0] had chapters in which their endings short stories. Two of the chapters (5: Learning and Intelligence, 14: Reality) had interesting excerpts from Smullyan's books Alice in Puzzle-land [1] and Five Thousand B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies [2], respectively. They highlight philosophical concepts in a way that makes them sort of 'self-explanatory', especially for a beginner student. He also has a textbook, Set Theory and the Continuum Problem which is a rigorous and technical work, and does a great job introducing and developing some results on the idea of forcing [3].

[0] Introducción a la Filosofía, César Tejedor.

[1] https://static01.nyt.com/packages/pdf/crossword/Smullyan_Ali... the story is in pp. 1-6

[2] https://books.google.cl/books?id=fzuKc5dGN5gC&lpg=PT80&ots=Q... until the comment of Second Positivist

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forcing_(mathematics)

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mwexlerFeb 2019

I read everything I could get my hands on that Smullyan wrote when I was 12 or so. I still have many of the copies of articles, old books, and the notes from my attempts to work his puzzles in a box, and just opening Alice in Puzzle-Land, like the madeleine from Proust, instantly brings me back to that time. Highly recommended.

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mechanical_fishSep 2008

A snapshot of my bookshelf's "math" section, which really hasn't changed much since I was in high school and hadn't taken calculus:

W.W. Sawyer, What is Calculus About? and Mathematician's Delight

Courant and Robbins, What is Mathematics?

Hogben, Mathematics for the Million

Steinhaus, Mathematical Snapshots

Ivars Peterson, The Mathematical Tourist

Davis and Hersh, The Mathematical Experience

Polya, How to Solve It

Huff, How to Lie With Statistics

McGervey, Probabilities in Everyday Life

Raymond Smullyan: The Lady or the Tiger, Alice in Puzzle-Land, others

Anything by Martin Gardner. I happen to have picked up Mathematical Magic Show and Mathematical Circus, but I'm sure there are many other collections.

I also recommend cryptography stuff. David Kahn's The Codebreakers is not really a math book, but it is awesome and it stars mathematicians, as does Simon Singh's The Code Book. You could read Schneier's Applied Cryptography.

This is HN, so I would be remiss if I didn't point out that you can learn a lot of fun and useful math by reading SICP, Knuth, or any good algorithms book.

If anybody out there knows a good, spirited statistics book addressed to someone who knows calculus, tell me. I keep planning to go through Fundamentals of Applied Probability Theory but I never get around to it; see "Related Resources" here:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

Having said all of that: I have a Ph.D. in physics/EE, so I've got to tell you, if you haven't tried calculus you haven't lived. ;) I'm not sure how to go about learning calculus in a fun way for a mathematician -- I took fairly standard first- and second-year college courses in calculus and physics and learned it that way. The folks on Amazon seem kind of enthusiastic about Spivak:

http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Michael-Spivak/dp/0914098918/...

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