by Lord Omlette.
Created 2006-01-22 992 BMT.
Updated 2006-01-22 002 BMT.
The reader who has persevered this far must by now be a cultivator of mathematics, even if he was not at the start of the endeavour. He will therefore appreciate that, while it may be ancient and venerable, it is far from complete; that not all of it is dry; and that its reasoning has not always been either unambiguous or irrefutable - nor is it yet.
-Ian Stewart, Appendix
That about sums it up. This book was incredibly easy to read, and despite being written more than 31 years ago, it's still relevant and illuminating. Individual topics are only investigated to the depth that we can see patterns emerge. Simple examples demonstrate why these topics are useful. Subsequent topics will usually refer back to elaborate on how everything is (surprisingly!) interwoven.
I can't recommend this book enough, many thanks to my family for picking it up for me. This book would work best, IMO, if you read it during the summer in between high school and college. I imagine that if I had read this book, specifically the chapters on "Short Cuts in the Higher Arithmetic" and "The Language of Sets", before I took CS 666 (Cryptography) @ Stevens-Tech, then I probably would've done much better in that course... I felt comfortable w/ the author because I had read one of his previous works, The Annotated Flatland.
ISBN: 0-486-28424-7. Purchase this book from amazon.com.
"Review of Concepts of Modern Mathematics" is Copyright © 2006 Lord Omlette. If you know otherwise, hollar.
Demona Lissa: hehe your so not cute ^^
Squid: ^^ thank you, thats the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.
Demona Lissa: heh, any time
-added 2003-12-13