Do you read any math books? (and if so, got any suggestions for fun ones? :D )

Started by KyriakosCH, Thu 03/11/2022 08:29:57

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KyriakosCH

I do, on occasion :) A week or so ago I finished reading the biography of John Conway, who is of interest to me due to his mostly geometric approach to problems. I am also 1/4 into his (co-author) book on symmetries ("The Symmetries of Things"), where one can find important (and decently recent) breakthroughs in using topology to examine 2d forms (in other words, negating the value of actual measurements).
For people interested in calculus, there is always a ton of new youtube videos, of varying quality and fun-to-solemnity ratio. Again I mostly like the geometrical presentations.
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KyriakosCH

Currently reading a historic (famous and celebrated) book on calculus, by Gardner. But although the first chapters were indeed a different approach (from first principles etc), now, 1/5 in the book, I was a bit surprised that Gardner considered it non-incogruous with his own stated approach to spend so many pages on presenting how to differentiate when you have multiplied or divided functions (who wants to read about division of polynomials here!  := ), when he hasn't even shown to the reader why differentiation actually matters. 

Then again the book has a co-author, so maybe those parts were written by the latter and the order was a compromise. Style is a bit inconsistent :) I am obviously waiting for the part about the anti-derivative.
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KyriakosCH

In the comments some people are jumping at the video's uploader because he/she didn't use the binomial expansion (it'd give a very brief argument; it's a large group of additions but already the first two sum up to 2, so it's obviously larger than 2), but seem to not care that if that method was used they'd see zero new info in the video anyway.
Hipsters ^^
I personally like the method presented.

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