A Map of Mathematics

The structure of any successful classification system: these things, those other things, and everything else. ;)

The MSC is of course quite useful for catalog and reference purposes.

They have also done videos on Map of Computer Science and Map of Physics. Do check them out.

We now start with the "why", see where knowledge fits in the puzzle of reality, where it plugs and how to find it; then only on a need-to-basis do we go deeper into the 'how'.

It also doesn’t discuss the mathematics itself in much depth; it more connects topics and has references (plenty of them) for those who want to learn about those topics.

“The World of Mathematics” by J.R. Newman isn’t a history, but more a sample of pure and, mostly, applied (“How to hunt a submarine” is the title of a chapter on operations research) mathematics.

I think it is worth mentioning, though, certainly for “tourists” who aren’t aiming for full coverage of the subject, but just want to visit nice viewpoints.

Also, I think it’s quite readable for non-mathematicians, as it doesn’t do much ‘real’ math (Stillwell's _Mathematics and its History_, mentioned elsewhere, has more of that in its first 25 pages than this 1000+ page work), and its chapters can be read in isolation.

1. An Introduction to Mathematics by Alfred North Whitehead, 1911 available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41568

It not specifically about history, but I found it nice how it builds up concepts from first principles, e.g. "We had problem X, so we invented math concept Y to help with problem X, and then extended the idea concept Z that handles more general class of problems."

2. Mathematics 1001: Absolutely Everything That Matters About Mathematics in 1001 Bite-Sized Explanations Hardcover by Richard Elwes, 2010. (non free)

This one doesn't go into any details on any topics, but it gives you a bird's eye overview of many topics and based on the "sampling" I did for the few concepts that I know, I found the bite-size explanations to be fairly good (i.e. mathematician explains things in plain language, and not science journalist simplistic analogy).

https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Experience-Phillip-J-Dav... is a link to Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-History-Physics-K%C3%A1roly-...

I read this decades ago before I learned advanced mathematics and I found it enlightening and inspiring at the time though I have not revisited it since though it is a cherished memory. The book's age prevents it from covering the many modern innovations since.

Agreed. But I was pleasantly surprised to find the map is built out of a HTML table and extremely simple js, and longer I looked at it the more I liked it.

I'd go so far as to say it's the back button that needs to change, rather than the site. By that I mean, it's often rather useful to have a stack-based history of your explorations around a map (like this, or a deep dive into Wikipedia, or...), but it'd also (obviously) be nice to pop the whole stack for this site and jump back to HN in a single step.

After all, why are browser history and bookmark navigation so linear when the way we use the web is not? It's like being forced to use turtle graphics or turn-based navigation to connect places on a geographic map. The bookmark manager in browsers is super primitive and hasn't really evolved in 20 years.

Likewise, think about when you have a plethora of open tabs; I've had as many as 400 at times, spread across 7 or 8 windows, with heavy insite overlap (ie I might have 10 tabs pointing at different books or products, multiple tabs going to a specific news outlet, multiple tabs pointing to different Wiki and Git pages etc.). Yet my open tabs are arranged in highly linear fashion along the top of each browser window, and there's no simple way to pull back from looking at the individual pages to looking at the map of my page universe.

tl;dr We use the web in a nonlinear way, like jumping around a dynamic tree, but the browser limits us to an ant-like perspective where leaves are privileged over the tree.