 |
| Ask HN: Best Mathematics book for complete noobie? | ||
| recommended by 2 users | 2009 | 78 points by babyboy808 | mathematics | original thread | | ||
Here's the story, I have never been very good at maths in school and to be honest, any other subjects really. I could get by, but never pushed myself. School was never the best environment for me to learn, but when I'm studying at home, I like it. So over the past few weeks I have been thinking about trying to learn mathematics again at my own pace (starting at the basics), what books would you recommend? | ||
| 2 users recommended this thread. What they said: |
| buckler Mar 27, 2010 | on: The case against teaching math | context |
|
liuhenry Feb 2, 2012 | on: Major unsolved problems in theoretical computer science? | context
My recommendation is "Concrete Mathematics", by Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik. (http://www.amazon.com/Concrete-Mathematics-Foundation-Comput...) It is excellently written, but by no means a light read. If you put in the time and effort, you will come out on the other side with a great foundation, and deep understanding and mastery of the topics. However, it's definitely not an introductory book, and some background in math will be very helpful. I'd also check out these threads: Ask HN: Best Mathematics book for complete noobie? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=755043 Ask HN: good math books http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=665029 Ask HN: Learning advanced math http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1753029 |
May be you've seen these HN threads about self-learning maths already... if not, hopefully you'll find these textbooks useful. Here's a little HN link dump, in the order of time at which the discussions took place (from the oldest to the most recent):
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108723
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201913
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458926
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=755043
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058359
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1193352
One caveat is that many of these textbooks do not come with a solutions manual. So, in terms of practice, I think that's where the dearth of uploaded lecture materials could come in. Sometimes, there might be no e-learning/opencourseware material for the topic you're interested in. In such cases, I found that if you look through universities' Websites closely enough, professors upload a lot of course materials on their personal pages. You can do this by finding a random university's math dept. page, then searching from course/faculty listings.
Last of all, I'm pretty certain you've heard of this site already, as it's being circulated quite a lot lately, but many have professed that videos from khanacademy.org to be quite helpful when grasping basic mathematical concepts.