Book recommendations?

[Anonymous No.10005508]

Books that sparked your interest in science/math/physics etc? Books that you found endlessly fascinating? Can be textbooks or not, just share your favs

[Anonymous No.10005515]

>>10005508
Not a book but i got interested in genetics after watching a documentary named "what darwin never knew".

[Anonymous No.10005786]

>>10005508

[Anonymous No.10005794]

>>10005508
this book is nice (pic related)

[Anonymous No.10005810]

>>10005508
I bumped into a copy of this while looking for books on sale one day in my undergrad and it was one of the things that pushed me over the edge from
>I study math because I don't really like anything else
to
>god damn math is fun

It's a collection of a whole bunch of ~20 page essays about all sorts of random cool shit all over math that could easily be taught to undergrads but never is.

[Anonymous No.10005812]

Godel Escher Bach
You owe it to yourself to give it a shot

[Anonymous No.10005816]

>>10005508
Hofstadter's GEB

[Anonymous No.10005821]

The Mind's I

[Anonymous No.10005828]

Holy shit, four Hofstadter recommendations
I love his work, don't get me wrong, but this shocking to me

I think you have your answer though, OP

[Anonymous No.10005848]

>>10005828
well he’s the son of a great physicist

witten was the son of a fairly irrelevant physicist ...

[Anonymous No.10005865]

spivak's calc, and seconding hofstadter.. wish I had more books I recommend in this category

[Anonymous No.10005936]

I'm in love with Herstein's Topics in Algebra. Also there's a book called Real Analysis for the Undergraduate, with an Invitation to Functional Analysis. Damn, why do they don't make more books like this? Imagine some "Abstract Algebra, with an invitation to Number Theory", "Set Theory, with an invitation to Combinatorics" "Linear Algebra, with an invitation to Physics"

>>10005786
>the manga guide to linear algebra
Unironically got me to understand how to calculate eigenvalues and why do they work that way

[Anonymous No.10005942]

>>10005508

[Anonymous No.10006029]

This is a fiction recommendation, but Finnegans Wake scratches this itch too. You can spend hours going over the wordplay or research every reference with a reading guide. It will lead you down crazy rabbitholes of folklore, history, theology, Irish culture, mathematics, linguistics, you name it.

If you put a little effort in, it's one of the most entertaining books ever written

[Anonymous No.10006062]

>>10005508
curious incident of the dog in the night time book about a child with aspergers discovering a neighborhood dog was killed by his father. Tons of crazy shit happens. Kid is a mathematical genius and whenever he woudl write tests he would explain some mathematical concepts it was really cool.

[Anonymous No.10006117]

>>10005821
What's this about? Any good? Dennet makes some good arguments about conciousness and stuff. Philosophically sound anywayv

[Anonymous No.10006124]

>>10006117
Read it for Hofstadter, not Dennet

[Anonymous No.10006125]

The big picture
A short history of nearly everything
Behave
The selfish gene
Other minds
A brief history of time
From eternity to here
Thinking fast and slow

Some pretty entry level stuff, but cast aside some of the hipsterdom from sci and this stuff is good biology, physics, neuroscience stuff. Some good philosophical reasoning in there too.

I've never been into chemistry, anything that might interest me in regards to fundamental or atomic chemistry?

[Anonymous No.10006209]

>>10006125
>The selfish gene
>A brief history of time

Kill yourself

[Anonymous No.10006218]

>>10006209
Ahh, an old classic. Magnificent post, sir. It elicited quite the chuckle from these old bones, whot whot!

[Anonymous No.10006518]

>>10006218
What's wrong with those books? Both are great starters books to understanding fundamental physics and genes. Care to share some good ones that fit inside the parameters the OP has set? Sure some info might be speculative or IFLS tier, I'm thinking the chapter on worm holes for example. But no need to get angry, friend.

[Anonymous No.10006519]

>>10006218
Meant for old mate above you sorry.

[Anonymous No.10006550]

[Anonymous No.10006618]

>>10005816
man, I gotta get into Hofstadter. seems to be a /sci/ darling

[Anonymous No.10007028]

>>10006618
meme book, and /sci/ is full of brainlets (just look at /mg/ and all the 0.99..!=1 posts), hence the popularity

[Anonymous No.10007033]

>>10007028
Surely you'll be able to point out what GEB got wrong then, yes?

[Anonymous No.10007045]

>>10007033
it's a popsci book

[Anonymous No.10007051]

>>10007045
That sounds bad. What did it get wrong?

[Anonymous No.10007306]

>>10005786
What the hell is this

[Anonymous No.10007337]

>>10007033
It is not wrong but he just waffles for 700 pages. You can get a better and more technical understanding of recursion from the first chapter of any computability theory text.

[Anonymous No.10007343]

John Stillwell's "Mathematics and It's History" is equally as good, perhaps even an easier read since it was written more recently and only by one author (whereas pic related was written by multiple Soviet authors in the early 60s as an account of the history of mathematics up to that time), but it didn't impact me as much.

[Anonymous No.10007429]

>>10007337
That waffling is the entire appeal of the book though, it takes you down so many interesting rabbitholes because it's trying to hint at the core concepts linking the various fields
Sure you could get a much more rigorous explanation of every field touched on in a text book, but altogether they're pointing you towards Hofstadter's relatively novel thesis