Mathematical snapshots

What Hacker News says

1. sn41Oct 2013
   The problem with popular science books is that they are written by journalists untrained in science. It should be scientists who write popular works. There are several scientists who have written great works which are neither difficult, nor dumbed down - for example, Steinhaus' "Mathematical Snapshots", Einstein and Infeld's "The Evolution of Physics", Schrodinger's "What is life?" and even delightful works such as Faraday's "Chemical history of a candle".

   With the hypercompetitiveness of modern scientific careers, scientists who take time off to write popular expositions are looked down upon. The problem is not Malcolm Gladwell, the problem is the insularity of modern scientists.

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2. 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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3. phllipSep 2008
   Steinhaus, Mathematical Snapshots Polya, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning Pappas, The Joy of Mathematics Gardner, The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems Winkler, Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection Andrews, Number Theory (Dover Books on Advanced Mathematics)

   - The last book is not really that advanced, It can be understood by most with an understanding through high school algebra II.

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