Book lists always make good space-fillers! So here we go ;)
Awhile back I stumbled upon an 8-year-old post from prolific author Ian Stewart listing his “Top 10” popular math books:
In 2012 that list was as follows (no particular order):
The Man Who Knew Infinity — Robert Kanigel
Gödel, Escher, Bach — Douglas Hofstadter
The Colossal Book of Mathematics — Martin Gardner
Euclid and The Rainforest — Joseph Mazur
Four Colors Suffice — Robin Wilson
What Is Mathematics, Really? — Reuben Hersh
Magical Mathematics — Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham
Games of Life — Karl Sigmund
Mathematical Tales of Mathematical Wonder — ed. by Rudy Rucker
The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy — Isaac Newton
(don't know what Stewart might add to that list in the dozen years since it appeared)
(don't know what Stewart might add to that list in the dozen years since it appeared)
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This made me start looking around the Web for other favorite popular math book lists. There were fewer than I expected.
This 13-member list comes from math teacher Ali Kayaspor:
- Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea — Charles Seife.
- Prelude to Mathematics — W.W. Sawyer.
- Measurement — Paul Lockhart
- The Joy of X — Steven Strogatz.
- An Imaginary Tale — Paul Nahin.
- Proofs From the Book — Aigner and Ziegler
- Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension — Matt Parker
- What is Mathematics? — Courant and Robbins
- A History of Pi — Petr Beckmann
- e: The Story of a Number -- Eli Maor
- Imagining Numbers -- Barry Mazur
- Journey Through Genius -- William Dunham
- Prime Obsession -- John Derbyshire
Kayaspor also has a separate book-list "for math people and designers":
From the GoodReads website comes this list of a dozen math-related books:
Gödel, Escher, Bach — D. Hofstadter
Fermat’s Enigma — Simon Singh
Flatland — Edwin Abbott
The Code Book — Simon Singh
Zero — Charles Seife
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers — Paul Hoffman
Journey Through Genius — W. Dunham
A Beautiful Mind — Sylvia Nasar
The Drunkard’s Walk — Leonard Mlodinow
How to Lie with Statistics — Darrell Huff
Euclid’s Elements — Euclid
What Is Mathematics — Courant and Robbins
The FiveBooks site offers this (2018) list of 10 best math 'history' books:
Prime Obsession — J. Derbyshire
Mathematics for the Nonmathematician — Morris Kline
Zero the biography of a dangerous idea — Charles Seife
A Concise History of Mathematics — Dirk Struik
Unknown Quantity — J. Derbyshire
The Math Book — Clifford Pickover
A History of Mathematics — Merzbach and Boyer
God Created the Integers — Stephen Hawking
Fermat’s Enigma — Simon Singh
Journey Through Genius — W. Dunham
The Fivebooks site has several other science/math related listings possibly worth perusing:
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This list comes from Peter Flom on Quora:
A Mathematician's Lament — Paul Lockhart
Out of the Labyrinth — Robert and Ellen Kaplan
Conversations with a Mathematician — Gregory Chaitin
Proofs and Refutations — Imre Lakatos.
Mathematics: Coffee Time in Memphis — Bela Belobas
The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Science 1250-15400 — Alfred Crosby
Godel Escher Bach — Douglas Hofstadter
The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel — Rebecca Goldstein
Group Theory in the Bedroom and Other Mathematical Diversions — Brian Hayes
Pretty much anything by Martin Gardner or Ian Stewart
Pretty much anything by Martin Gardner or Ian Stewart
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Here's one of several Reddit threads related to favorite math books:
Simon Singh offers up a long list of recommendations here:
And finally, I’ll add my own tentative baker's-dozen list (in no special order, and subject to change on a different day-of-the-week) to the mix:
The Prime Number Conspiracy — ed. by Thomas Lin
Single Digits — Marc Chamberland
Math With Bad Drawings — Ben Orlin
Things To Make and Do In the Fourth Dimension — Matt Parker
How Not To Be Wrong -- Jordan Ellenberg
The Language of Mathematics — Keith Devlin
The Colossal Book of Mathematics — Martin Gardner
How Mathematicians Think — William Byers
The Music of the Primes — Marcus du Sautoy
Mathematics For Everyone — Laurie Buxton
Grapes of Math — Alex Bellos
Unknown Quantity — John Derbyshire
The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Mathematics -- David Wells
The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Mathematics -- David Wells
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3 additional books are among my all-time favorites, but their subject matter crosses so many boundaries that I don’t really think of them as ‘popular math books’:
The Outer Limits of Reason — Noson Yanofsky
Gödel, Escher, Bach — Douglas Hofstadter
When Einstein Walked With Gödel — Jim Holt
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By the way, for those whose taste runs to fiction Alex Kasman maintains a large site of recommended math-related fiction/novels:
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/
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By the way, for those whose taste runs to fiction Alex Kasman maintains a large site of recommended math-related fiction/novels:
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/
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Honestly though, all of these barely scratch the surface of the wonderful math reading that is out there. Indeed, I think we're currently experiencing a kind of golden age for popular math!
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