Maths suggested reading list
These books are not text books, they deal with the historical development of mathematics and some of the personalities and problems that have shaped the subject. They’re also lively, very readable and (best of all) have very few if any exercises.
Imagining Numbers – Barry Mazur.
Ever wondered what the square root of -1 is, do you know what the three cube roots of 1 are? This book deals with these imaginary and complex numbers, and in particular the links between the thought processes involved in comprehending these numbers and in writing poetry.
Dr Riemann’s Zeros – Karl Sabbagh
Prime numbers appear amongst our counting numbers seemingly in a random fashion; however the Riemann Hypothesis suggests a pattern to their appearance. Controversially proved in the few weeks by Louis De Branges, find out why your credit card could no longer be safe.
Chaos – James Gleick
Why can’t we accurately predict the weather more than six days in advance? In a chaotic world the butterfly effect, strange attractors and fractals give us the answer - a highly accessible bestseller.
Fermat’s Last Theorem – Simon Singh
Fermat’s scribbled note in a margin promising a solution to a thousand-year-old problem from Greek mathematics sparked efforts to reproduce this proof. It took a further 300 years before a proof was found, but was Fermat brilliant, mistaken or just bluffing?
The man who loved only numbers – Paul Hoffman
Paul Erdos was the stereotypical mathematician: chaotic, absent-minded, obsessive and brilliant, mathematics dominated his life. At conferences he would fall asleep waking in time only to ask the most intuitive and perceptive questions. On one occasion he fell asleep while addressing an eminent collection of professors. A true eccentric.
Nature’s Numbers – Ian Stewart
Why are four-leaved clovers lucky, why do leopards have spots and tigers stripes? Certain numbers and patterns occur in nature more often then others, Fibonacci sequences, the Golden Ratio and Chaos provide some of the reasons why.
The nothing that is and The art of the infinite – Robert and Ellen Kaplan.
These two books are about the development of the concept of zero and infinity, two of the cornerstones of our number system.
The symbols 0 – 9 we use every day come from the Arabic script but 0 itself was first used in India. Try doing addition or multiplication without using zero, the Greeks and Romans had to.
Infinity has had a more controversial history than zero and took longer to be accepted. The Greeks were familiar with fractions but had no decimal system and so had problems when dealing with numbers such π (an infinite non-repeating decimal) which have no exact fractional equivalent. Nineteenth century mathematicians were horrified when Georg Cantor presented the idea of two different types of infinities (countable and uncountable), which led to the strange world of transfinite numbers.
These books take up the stories of zero and infinity in a very readable manner.
There are many other good popular science books about mathematics (including other books written by the authors above). Try the public libraries or the shelves of Boarders or Waterstones.
