history
vacation reading
by anders pearson
Mon 06 Jan 2003 21:42:07
being home in maine, i didn't have much preventing me from getting a little further down my reading list.
what i finished during vacation:
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316316962/">The Tipping Point</a>, by Malcolm Gladwell
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/068486875X/">Emergence</a>, by Steven Johnson
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486240614/">An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise</a>, by John Robinson Pierce
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486266397/">Mathographics</a>, by Robert Dixon
and i made it a ways into <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486600882/">Euclid's Elements</a>.
i've been getting really interested in math again lately and i must say that <a href="http://www.doverpublications.com/">Dover Books</a> have been a godsend. if you go to the Mathematics section of a bookstore and start looking at prices, you'll notice that most books on math are <em>really</em> expensive. but the Dover books mostly seem to hover around $10-12. they tend to be older but still are often of decent quality. when you <em>think</em> you might be interested in tensor analysis but aren't really sure, spending $10 on a Dover book is a reasonable investment.
on a related note, does anyone have a good introductory calculus book they recommend? i can <em>do</em> most calculus that comes my way but i haven't actually <em>studied</em> calculus for 5 or 6 years and i'd like to brush up and fill in the gaps in my memory. i have a bunch of books on vector calculus and differential equations left over from my college classes but i did all my intro calculus in high school and they take the books back at the end of the year.