[luminadiffusion]

Physics & Mathematics - Anyone who seriously pursues these fields learns to embrace the challenges as beautiful and the struggle to unravel their nature as fulfilling. To do this, we embrace the beauty in nature and see the connection with everything around us. Four books come to mind.

Physics:

1. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman

2. The Universe in a Nutshell by Steven Hawking

Mathematics:

1. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by J.A. Paulos

2. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by D. Hofstadter

These books brilliantly illuminate the beauty in these fields. They show you that underneath all of that complex notation and "math speak" are beautiful ideas about life, the universe, and the nature of reality. These fueled me, even in to my PhD research. I still love them today.

[debanjan16]

Aha! GEB! Do you think a complete beginner with no knowledge in higher math should read GEB?

[reducesuffering]

GEB really doesn't have much complicated math. If you're willing to spend a bit of time thinking about the (logical) concepts presented, you should read it just fine.

[wink]

I actually thought of GEB and did a search over all comments because I thought it might be mentioned.

I'd love to hear a non-programmer/non-mathematician's take on it because I kinda didn't like it at all. I found it very elaborate and slow-developing with no real insight (maybe because the concepts weren't new or maybe because I'm more someone who prefers reading an encyclopaedia over watching a historically correct movie about something).

[mdp2021]

Gödel, Escher, Bach is an artistic appetizer over the stimulating world of structures, - not a manual.

They young mind is opened by being shown relations it did not yet see.

Read the extreme in that direction:

Italo Calvino - Le città invisibili

(which not only masterfully connects ideas, but most of the realm of existence and experience) - you should be able to see that principle at its apex. And there is no technical teaching: just an education to see the subtle.

[armoredkitten]

Non-mathematician here (psychologist now doing work in data science & machine learning). I was told this book had interesting insights about AI, consciousness, and the like. But I read it last year and found it the most tedious, absolutely unfocused book I've ever read.

Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant person, a polymath. He clearly loves wordplay and classical music. But his ramblings are so often tangential and self-indulgent that probably half the book could be trimmed out without cutting anything insightful. Gödel is important to the book. Escher...makes pictures that, if you squint real hard, could be construed as kind of relevant. Bach...well, the author just likes Bach and decided that he needed to be present. The latter two figures are essentially just used for some examples that could probably have been explained more clearly without using music as the context, given that it then requires him to delve into all the details about how fugues are different from canons, etc. etc.

Let's just say, reading the author's introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of the book states his main premises much more succinctly, to the point where you can skip the rest of the 700+ pages of the book.

[nescioquid]

> Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant person...but his ramblings are so often tangential and self-indulgent that probably half the book could be trimmed...

When you consider how much worth-while reading remains for each of us and how little time we have, I've come to think such prolix authors have bad manners of the self-indulgent kind.

[mdp2021]

> a complete beginner with no knowledge in higher math should read GEB

Yes, absolutely, without a doubt. A "spirit of mathematics" and a proficiency in the (practical) details of the discipline are very different things.