mathbabe

The Joy of X is based on a New York Times series of a couple of years ago. I just received the book and haven’t gotten a chance to read it yet but did read the series. The series was great and I expect the book to be too. But in the interest of full disclosure, Steven Strogatz is a friend. A great book (not written by a friend—I don’t even know him) that I’m about a third of the way through is Math in 10 Lessons: The Grand Tour. It’s a pure mathematics book that tries to show those in the humanities, as well as scientists and other non- mathematicians, how mathematicians view their discipline.

“Meta math, the quest for Omega” by Gregory Chaitin is as mind bending than GEB

Have you tried The Puzzling Adventures of Dr Ecco, by Dennis Shasha?

Late to the party, I suggest “The enjoyment of Mathematics” by Rademacher&Toeplitz, maybe old fashioned but I remember having a lot of fun .

Bob Moses & Charles Cobb. Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project. Beacon Press, 2002.

http://www.algebra.org/

Jeffrey Isaac. 1999. “The Algebra Project & Democratic Politics,” Dissent (Winter).

Highly recommended for trying to draw the analogy between the importance of verbal literacy to the struggle for voting rights in the 1960s and the importance of math literacy for poor/minority kids in contemporary America – if, of course, we hope them to have the opportunities of political & economic citizenship. Ella Baker meets quadratic equations.

The project has been running since the mid-1980s and raises all sorts of interesting political issues (hence the Isaac piece) but gets relatively little attention.

I just came across your list (and site) and would like to suggest a few title I have enjoyed. One of the first books to get me interested in math was “Fermat’s Last Theorem” by Simon Singh, followed by several of Martin Gardner’s articles and books, “In Code” by Sarah Flannery, and several large reference-style compendiums that prove quite useful in trying to get a handle on new subjects, “Mathematics, From the Birth Of Numbers” by Jan Gullberg, “The VNR Concise Encyclopedia Of Mathematics” by W. Gellert et al, Martin Gardner’s :The Colossal Book of Mathematics:, and Dr. Richard Elwes’s “Mathematics 1001″.

Most recently, I just finisthed Nate Silver’s “The Signal and The Noise” and “Connected” by Nicholas A. Christakis.

I hope these suggestions help a bit and the site continues to provide such an interesting contribution to a fascinating subject.

This is my favorite – ‘A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates’. Not for the book but for the good read in Amazon’s comments about it.

Brian Butterworth, The Mathematical Brain;

Graham Farmelo, ed., It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science;

Robert Kaplan, The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero;

E. T. Jaynes, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (corrected ed.);

David Acheson, From Calculus to Chaos.

T. Korner has written several books other than “Pleasures of Counting” that are pretty accessible. His two Fourier Analysis books are written at an mid-undergraduate level, and his game theory book is at an advanced high school/early undergraduate level. Also both are full of fun stories. And very relevant since Fourier methods and their extensions have been so important over the past two centuries in so many fields, both pure and applied.

I wish I could suggest a good applied computational mathematics book. Sadly I don’t think there’s a great book out there yet. Also it’s a moving target, since the best languages, methods, libraries, and problems change from decade to decade.