<p>S was disappointed that "The Life of Pi," which I added to his pile of books to take to camp, wasn't about the number. :) He didn't read it first session, and I doubt he'll have read it by the end of second session.</p>
<p>Last year, he took his first humanities course at CTY (second session; first session was a science course), and this year, both of his CTY courses are humanities courses. After the first session, he told me, "Next year, I've got to take math course!" I think he's missing them! (And here next year I was hoping he'd take "Crafting the Essay!" Oh, well!)</p>
<p>Might the learned CC denizens (:-)) have suggestions for books about math to which I might steer him when he returns from camp?</p>
<p>Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Be warned it's a slow read, even for the math-inclined, because there's so much to think about. </p>
<p>The Number Devil is a little gem of a book about a 12 year old who hates math who is visited in his dreams by a "number devil" who explains to him the beauties of higher math. Some of the math and concepts will be familiar to your S, some won't be--it's still a delightful read.</p>
<p>Flatland by Edward? Edwin? Abbot. The victorian classic story about a two-dimensional world, used to illustrate how we three-dimensional creatures can think about four dimensions.</p>
<p>Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann is a historical novel; one of the characters is mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. S may be a little too young, dunno.</p>
<p>Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. Math AND baseball in one book! </p>
<p>What the Numbers Say by Derrick Niederman and David Boyum. Why it’s important to have a clue about things mathematical, and how to have that clue. </p>
<p>More specifically math-related books:
Coincidence, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz by Edward Burger and Michael Starbird</p>
<p>Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations by Keith Ball</p>
<p>How old is your S? The titles above are good. Others:
Simon Singh, The Code Book;
Peter Beckmann, A History of Pi.
Sarah Flannery, In Code (about a female math-whiz' education).</p>
<p>The Life of Pi is not a math book, but it's a good one.</p>
<p>The Book of Numbers *by John Conway and Richard Guy. (Conway invented The Game of Life).
*
Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers by Jan Gullberg - Huge book full of cool stuff. </p>
<p>In Code: A Mathematical Journey by Sarah Flannery and David Flannery "At 16, Flannery made worldwide headlines as Ireland's 1999 Young Scientist of the Year for her discovery and presentation of the Cayley-Purser algorithm, an innovative encryption system roughly 22 times faster than the worldwide standard RSA algorithm." (from Amazon description)</p>
<p>My son took Game Theory and Probability and Cryptology at CTY and enjoyed both. They did some matrix math in the first course which he didn't see again till he took a Quantum Mechanics course.</p>
<p>SliveyTove, so far as I know, the only book listed above that S has read is "Godel, Escher, Bach." He read that in 8th grade when he was casting about for a book to read for his music class. (And though he didn't use it for the music class, he liked it and read it again. :) )</p>
<p>marite, S is 14 and a rising HS sophomore. </p>
<p>mathmom, S also took Crypto and really liked it. His Math Modeling class included some matrix math, IIRC. That course (MM) really pushed him.</p>
<p>Some more titles:
Ivars Peterson The Mathematical Tourist;
Ian Stewart, From Here to Infinity
Paul Nahin, An Imaginary Tale: The Story of [Square Root of -1]<a href="I%20can't%20do%20the%20symbol">/I</a>
Eli Maor, *e:The Story of a Number
Keith Devlin, Life by the Numbers {Companion to PBS series)
Robert S. Wolf, Proof, Logic, and Conjecture
Robert & Ellen Kaplan, The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero
Michael & Ellan Kaplan, Chances Are: Adventures in Probability
There are also some books more focused on competition math that he would probably enjoy.</p>
<p>Raymond Smullyan's books are quite good collections of logic puzzles, and they are also entertaining. A few are The Lady or The Tiger? (goes through Goedel's Theorem), What is the Name of this Book?, This Book Needs No Title, and The Magic Garden of George B. and Other Logic Puzzles. </p>
<p>John Derbyshire's book: Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics.<br>
On the one hand, this will be challenging for a high-schooler. On other other hand, I think it's mostly readable and it's a great introduction to some fascinating math . . . and since Andrew Wiles has knocked off Fermat's Last Theorem, one might as well dream of proving the Riemann Hypothesis, now. </p>
<p>Euclid's Window, Feynman's Rainbow, and The Drunkard's Walk (three separate books) by Leonard Mlodinow are all entertaining, and comparatively easy reads.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Second on Smullyan and Derbyshire. Both are excellent. Derbyshire also has a good book on the history of algebra. I think it's called Unknown Quantity.</p></li>
<li><p>I'm surprised no one has mentioned any of Martin Gardner's collections of recreational math problems, all of which are superb and great fun. </p></li>
<li><p>Ian Stewart succeeded Gardner at Scientific American and also has a number of good books out, some of which have been mentioned (though unlike Gardner, Stewart also has a number of scholarly math tomes and textbooks out, so approach with a bit of caution. Fearful Symmetry is especially good). </p></li>
<li><p>If he liked Godel Escher Bach, you might pick him up Nagel and Newman's book taking the reader through Godel's actual proof. </p>
<ul>
<li>Rudy Rucker's Infinity and the Mind is mind-blowing.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>"
- I'm surprised no one has mentioned any of Martin Gardner's collections of recreational math problems, all of which are superb and great fun."</p>
<p>Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American is why I was a math major, and where I first discovered the coolness of numbers, and phi, and how the Fibonacci sequence just keeps popping up EVERYWHERE (at about age 14).</p>
<p>So I enthusiastically second this suggestion.</p>
<p>Treetopleaf--that's funny, our whole family is in love with Feynman. He's always on the list of "famous people we would like to have to dinner." :D</p>
<p>My H grew up with The Mathematical Magpie and we have it around here someplace. From the Amazon description: "The companion volume to Fadiman's Fantasia Mathematica, this second anthology of mathematical writings is even more varied and contains stories, cartoons, essays, rhymes, music, anecdotes, aphorisms, and other oddments. Authors include Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, and many other renowned figures."</p>
<p>Now I want to go find Fantasia Mathematica!</p>
<p>A few years ago, the tot's dad got a number of Feynman's books from me for Christmas, so the kid does have them available in his universe. </p>
<p>S and I both enjoyed Gardner's columns over the years (and I very much enjoyed his annotated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which I read a few months ago). </p>
<p>I'll be hitting the library in the coming week; thanks!!</p>
<p>Owlice, my S finally took Crafting the Essay after exhausting all of the philosophy courses. My observation was that it seemed to bump his writing up to another level, simply by encouraging him to think about it in different ways. He wasn't as enthusiastic about the class as he was about the philosophy courses, which typically had TAs who were philosophy grad students whom he found to be very cool (in addition to the great professors). The CTE TA was not very impressive, although the prof was excellent.</p>
<p>Not a math book, but related: <em>Freakonomics</em> is an interesting read.</p>
<p>My daughter did Crafting the Essay last fall as an online class. It fit her schedule beautifully, as it is not too time consuming. It got her to believe in her writing, and was great preparation for the much more challenging Academic Writing II class she took through Duke TIP during the spring semester. She now enjoys writing so much that she will be starting a 2-week writing camp next week.</p>
<p>My son adored the two Simon Singh books already mentioned.</p>
<p>I liked -- although less so as it got towards the end -- a book called The Parrot's Theorem by Denis Guedj, which is sort of a Sophie's World-type treatment of the history of mathematics (i.e., a mystery that the teenage protagonists have to solve by understanding the development of math concepts from Euclid through the early 20th Century).</p>