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Comment by tmoertel | Hacker News Reader

Another great book, starting with the basics and then exploring a wide range of mathematical subjects, is The Princeton Companion to Mathematics:

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8350.html

It's fun to just flip it open and start reading.

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This is a wonderful book. A word of caution though: don't get the Kindle version from Amazon. I thought I'd get it for the Kindle, because the print version is huge and I sometimes like to read in bed and don't want to lug the dead tree version I own around, but I had to return it because of the standard problems with garbled notation (some symbols appearing as a square box or some other incorrect symbol) that affects every math book I've ever purchased on Amazon for the Kindle.

There error rate was much lower than in any other math book I've tried, but still much too high.

Yes and it's conveniently available on Safari [0] if the sticker shock of the print edition is too much. Also, the editor Tim Gowers wrote Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction [1].

0: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/math/9781400830398

1: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000SEP2T2/

I clicked the link expecting to see this book. It's pretty impressive (and beautifully finished besides).

Agreed, well worth the price. The most useful books i have are these 2 Math for Physics undergrads books that capsulize the first 2 years of calculus, linear algebra etc that all math, physics, EE students go thru

http://www.scribd.com/doc/65695685/Mary-L-Boas-Mathematical-...

(older edition of Arfken et al

http://www.scribd.com/doc/84183760/Arfken-G-B-Weber-H-J-Math...

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