Men of mathematics
A collection of biographies describing the lives and achievements of 29 mathematicians. Includes Zeno, Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, Newton, and Leibniz.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
25mentions
20people
2007–2025years
56% recommend40% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Is there a book other than Bell’s “Men of Mathematics” that broadly covers the lives of a lot of mathematicians? I loved that book when I read it as an undergraduate, but I wouldn’t mind having a second opinion.
- Men of Mathematics: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Mathematicians from Zeno to Poincaré
Reading about the personalities of mathematics really widened my perspective of the motivations behind the math and the wide range of people involved in pushing it forward. It’s what inspired me to learn math for fun in my free time
- 1. Physics for Entertainment (aka Physics for Fun), Mathematics can be Fun, Arithmetic for Fun, Algebra for Fun etc. all by Yakov Perelman (aka Y.I.Perelman) and published by Mir Publishers in the erstwhile USSR. These were absolutely fantastic and kindled interest in Science/Maths for a whole generation of people across the World. Beg, Borrow or Steal these and make every kid read them. None of the "Modern" popular science books can hold a candle to these books.
- https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22YAKOV+PERE...
2. Men of Mathematics and Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science both by E.T.Bell
- https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Bell%2C+Er...
3. More recently, i found Who Is Fourier?: A Mathematical Adventure excellent. It is written in "manga" style but the contents are great! Every student should read this.
- I've seen a number of attacks on sites like Equitable Math. The criticisms I've seen seem to fall into several categories (this may not be exhaustive):
* "Math should always have one answer and this idea that there could be different ways of doing things is evil and will corrupt our youth. Objective = one answer." Ugh. As a mathematician this is the one I hate the most. This is what led Pythagoreans to campaign against irrational numbers, some Catholics to campaign against imaginary numbers, some folks to react against distributions/generalized derivatives/generalized functions in analysis. The whole point of math, the whole creativity and beauty and opportunity for innovation, is to see how you can break the rules!! Hyperbolic and spherical geometry are not tools of the DeViL!!! Nor are they woke. David Brooks, get a frikkin education [1].
* "You shouldn't talk about race in math because math is objective." Math is a human activity, humans are embedded in society. Brown vs Board was decided within my parents' lifetime. Racial segregation was the official policy of many educational institutions for most of US history and students will come with different educational histories. When you're teaching, you want to connect with students and you want to trace the intellectual history of the topic. It is more intellectually honest to acknowledge the unfairness of history than pretend it doesn't exist, and for students to understand the intertwined evolution of mathematics and technology they must understand historical context as well. When you're trying to motivate kids, especially, role models and stories from history and today can be useful, which is why ET Bell published Men of Mathematics [2] which inspired folks like Freeman Dyson, and we today include Power in Numbers by Talithia Williams, Mathematically Gifted and Black at https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/, Lathisms at https://www.lathisms.org/, Mathematicians of the African Diaspora at https://www.mathad.com/home, and more. There's not much point in dwelling on race/gender/sexuality, but intentional censorship (pretending Alan Turing wasn't gay, pretending Elbert Frank Cox had equal employment opportunities) is deeply dishonest.
* "Math should not be a tool for social justice." Um, what should it be? As I wrote in my other comment on this thread, everything is a tool. Math is a tool for justice, for oppression, for carpentry, for art, for software design, for computer games, for gerrymandering and anti-gerrymandering. As a mathematician I just want everyone to have access to this tool, rather than only some people! The idea that education can help people and society better them/itselves is not new. Check out the work of Bob Moses during the Civil Rights Movement [3]. It's a good read as everyone in America agrees the Civil Rights Movement was Good but many of those people believe "wokeness" is Bad -- because the concept of wokeness is also a tool used for many purposes. The argument is just over how people get to use this tool and who gets to use it.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opinion/this-is-how-woken...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Mathematics
[3] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/206027/radical-equa...
- > Figuring them is easy from experience but the math behind that is way harder; anything beyond simple equations is like alien language to me ...
It took me a long (and often frustrating) time to figure out that the perception of difficulty is largely because of how implicit most everything is in mathematics. It's not like programming where eventually there is a compiler with a definite structure that's going to make your program behave in some exact specific way.
Even worse, is the way we're typically taught mathematics, it's always kinda starting in the middle (as opposed to the beginning). We aren't taught about what it is our how it works, so it's really hard to situate particular mathematical concepts we're taught into a larger coherent framework.
The way I interpret mathematical works changed so much (and for the better), once I realized that any significant bit of math you're using is the result of something a human was trying to accomplish. In the same way you can point to a piece of code and ask it's developer what the motivation was for some abstraction or algorithm, there are always reasons behind the development of mathematical systems. Once I understood that, rather than mathematical systems being these disconnected things that materialized out of nowhere, I started seeing commonalities and considering the reasoning behind them, and seeing more of the network that relates them. It became a lot more enjoyable. I'd recommend checking out some history of mathematics if you'd like to get a better sense of that (my personal intro recommendation: "Men of Mathematics" by E.T. Bell or maybe "Mathematics and the Imagination," which isn't history so much, but serves a similar goal).
If you're looking for something on algorithms specifically the book recommended by the author ("The Algorithm Design Manual") is a pretty friendly read and largely non-mathematical, while still containing all the useful bits (unless you're looking for a reference work on computational complexities or something).
- I was in a very similar situation. The thing that helped me the most was getting an understanding of what it is mathematicians are trying to do and what their methods are. "What is Mathematics?" ended up being pretty pivotal (as another poster mentioned), though the topics did seem pretty random to me when going through it at first. The introductory material to "The Princeton Companion to Mathematics" is an excellent compass for orienting yourself. That introductory portion is about 120 pages, though it's a huge book (well over 1000 pages) and the rest of it probably won't be too useful to you for a while (but at the same time, those intro essays were invaluable). I'd second Axler's "Linear Algebra Done Right" as a nice early (yet pretty serious, despite the title) book. Linear algebra is used all over the place, and the way it's addressed in that book you'll learn something about creating mathematical systems rather than merely how to use some existing system. It also helped me understand what's interesting and why in mathematics to read in philosophy of mathematics and math history, and popularizations, etc. "Men of Mathematics" is quite good, as are "Gödel's Proof" and "Mathematics and the Imagination."
Once I was immersed in it for a while, I started getting into more CS related mathematics: things in computation theory, programming language theory, category theory--and I would spend a lot of time reading networks of wikipedia math articles from basically random starting points inspired by something I read. Didn't understand much to start with, but I'm glad I did it and I find them indispensable now.
I think it's of the utmost importance to go into it with an understanding that you SHOULD feel lost and confused for quite a while--but trust in your mind to sort it out with a little persistence, and things will start coming together. If you find yourself avoiding math, finding it unpleasant and something you 'just can't do,' check out Carol Dweck's 'Self-Theories.' Good luck!
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