100 books like A Mind For Numbers

The best book for college students, Newport wrote the book by looking at top-scoring, relaxed students and observing what they used to study. His findings mostly back up my own book, Ultralearning, which points to the importance of active recall over review, solving problem sets in technical classes and Quiz and Recall for essay-based classes.

I think about this book every day, even though it was written almost 25 years ago, and the edition I read explained how to manage your paper file folders! (One of my most-used apps, the to-do manager Things, is built on this system.)

I love how much time this book has saved me as I juggle running several businesses, staying active in my hobbies, and running a household. Allen’s approach to capturing your ideas and then deciding how to organize them so that you can keep track of what needs your attention is both simple and really profound.

For athletes who need to be as efficient as possible to reserve time and energy for training, this book is a lifesaver.

Harvard-educated cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham is one of the foremost experts in educational psychology. While the title of this book may not sound so appealing, it’s really a tight summary of some of the most important principles of psychology to learning more effectively. Willingham’s blog and other books are also excellent resources for someone who wants to understand how to learn well.

Richard Feynman was unique. A brilliant theoretical physicist, humorous, eccentric, and independent.

Feynman’s genius gave him a certain freedom, which he exploited to the full. The book is autobiographical and shows his often irresponsible behavior but also a relentless curiosity, and willingness to try anything, the essence of a successful scientist.

One cannot hope to imitate Feynman (and perhaps we should not: he was often mischievous, even mildly malicious); but any scientist should envy the way he approached problems in engineering as well as science—and the book is fun!

In my opinion, Prof. Axler's book is the best way to learn the formal proofs of linear algebra theorems.

My undergraduate studies were in engineering, so I never learned the proofs. This is why I chose this book to solidify my understanding of the material; it didn't disappoint! Already, in the first few chapters, I learned new things about concepts that I thought I understood.

The book contains numerous exercises which were essential for the learning process. I went through the exercises with a group of friends, which helped me stay motivated. It wasn't easy, but all the time I invested in the proofs was rewarded by a solid understanding of the material.

I highly recommend this book as a second book on linear algebra.

This may seem an odd choice, but as a maths popularizer I need to know all that I can about why some people find the main elements of the subject so difficult. I found Doug French's book exceptionally helpful in this respect, even though it is aimed principally at high school teachers. This is partly because he focuses throughout on the most important mathematical ideas and difficulties. Moreover, the scope is wider than the title suggests, for he also ventures imaginatively into both geometry and calculus.

Prof. Strang has been teaching linear algebra at MIT for more than 60 years! This wealth of experience shines through in his book, which covers all the standard concepts using clear and concise explanations that have been polished through time and contain just the right amount of details.

The book is accompanied by a whole course of video lectures available through MIT OpenCourseWare or via YouTube. I learned a lot from Prof. Strang's approach to teaching; in particular, I appreciate the visualization of the fundamental theorem of linear algebra and his explanation of the matrix-vector product from the column picture and the row picture.

If you want to learn linear algebra, you can't go wrong with this classic.

For decades, the most famous opening chord in rock and roll was an unsolved problem, since no one could reproduce it. But in 2004, Jason Brown, a professor at Dalhousie University, used mathematics to recreate the opening chord of the Beatles hit song, “A Hard Day’s Night”. I remember when newspapers around the world reported on Jason’s findings, as I was at Dalhousie at the time, as one of Jason’s Ph.D. students.

Jason’s Beatles story serves as the final chapter in this wonderful book, a collection of short vignettes about how mathematics relates to every aspect of our lives, including garbage pickup routes, grocery shopping, political polling, and social networks. The book’s thesis is that as we understand mathematics better, our lives become more meaningful. I couldn’t agree more.    

Discover Condorcet!

Most people, when asked to name a philosopher who wrote about inequality, would think of Rousseau. Condorcet was the last of the Encyclopédistes, young enough to experience the revolution in 1789—sadly, also one of its victims.

Unlike his philosopher colleagues, he participated actively in public policymaking, first in the Ministry of Finance, later as an elected member of the Legislative Assembly after the revolution. He chaired an organization working for the abolition of slavery. He argued for equal rights for women before Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft had published their more well-known pamphlets. He co-authored the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and also wrote a proposal for new constitution for France.

Most importantly, he realized the fundamental role of education as a means to reduce inequality and liberate mankind, and he even developed curricula for the various stages of a general… show more.

Mesopotamian mathematics is a fascinating subject; their numerical system was based on 60, and the ancient thinkers were adept at many types of calculations and word problems. Hundreds of clay tablets reflect their advanced understanding of mathematical principles. Eleanor Robson explains clearly in this book how historians and mathematicians have interpreted the evidence, and she discusses not just specific mathematical texts, how they are understood, and the way ideas were expressed, but she also introduces the scribes who developed and learned it all, and even the buildings in which they worked. The book is a “social history,” as the subtitle notes, and also an intellectual adventure.