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Two incredible general interest math books came out this year: The Big Bang of Numbers and The Joy or Abstraction. Both are brilliantly written and convey sophisticated math concepts for general intellectual development versus math specialists. The later book gave me a good foundation for some ideas in category theory I still hadn’t internalized on an intuitive level after reading more conventional academic works.

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I am currently reading The Joy of Abstraction.

This is a fine book.

But what this book needed is a good editor. Most space of most chapters of the book is written like a preface.

This book also suffers from what many technical books suffers from- uneven assumption of background. While some easy, trivial part is explained with more space, more hand-holding, harder parts receive briefer, relatively unfriendlier treatment.

Despite these flaws, the book is great.

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