10

Most of math books require you to copy proofs and do excersices to extract the content from them. Are there any good serious math books which require only reading and no writing?

ADDED: One possibility is a book that puts emphasis on intuition and thus puts a familiar subject in a different light without requiring anything but reading.

bubba
  • 43,483
  • 3
  • 61
  • 122
  • 1
    Good "serious" math armchair reads. I am staring at a shelf of better than 100 paper examples of "good" and "serious". The only ones that come to mind as armchair reads are the math history books, Number buy Tobias Dantzig being one great example. I usually require pencil and paper for my serious reading. – J. W. Perry Dec 05 '13 at 08:00
  • 1
    possible duplicate of Good math bed-time stories for children? – Shuchang Dec 05 '13 at 08:02
  • 2
    @ShuchangZhang not exactly. I'm looking for books that might even have high prerequisites in a certain subject. – Saal Hardali Dec 05 '13 at 08:05
  • The Princeton Companion to Mathematics by Timothy Gowers is also a great armchair read, although you might find yourself occasionally inspired to reach for some writing tools, and it is a big book requiring pillow cushion if read in bed. Another of my favorite owned books. – J. W. Perry Dec 05 '13 at 08:07
  • 2
    King Ptolemy asked Euclid the same question... – Grigory M Dec 05 '13 at 08:08
  • @ShaulBarkan You are? But user106581 raised the question? Sorry and I've retracted the vote. – Shuchang Dec 05 '13 at 08:08
  • There is also an excellent list in this MO thread: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/8609/favorite-popular-math-book – pritam Dec 05 '13 at 08:11
  • Courant's What is Mathematics, perhaps? – Newb Dec 05 '13 at 08:11
  • @ShuchangZhang I'm just just trying to make the best out of this question. – Saal Hardali Dec 05 '13 at 08:12
  • 3
    @GrigoryM "Sire, there is no Royal Road to Geometry!" :)) Priceless. – J. W. Perry Dec 05 '13 at 08:26
  • The greatest, nicest and most wonderful advantage of doing mathematics is that it usually requires only paper, pencil and some gray matter...and you want to give up the first two? How can one read a really interesting mathematics book and refrain from checking and developing what's in it? – DonAntonio Dec 05 '13 at 11:48
  • I find that almost any maths book helps me sleep :-) – bubba Dec 05 '13 at 14:09

3 Answers3

5

You might try reading some papers in the philosophy of math. They don't require you to do any computations or exercises. I am interested in the philosophy of probability, so the first thing that comes to mind is this paper. The author, Alan Hájek, has many other good papers worth reading.

If you want something longer, a classic book is Proofs and Refutations by Lakatos.

Potato
  • 40,171
  • The link to the paper is dead, what was the name of the paper? It seems the author has several papers on probability. – William Oliver Mar 13 '18 at 20:35
  • 1
    @WilliamOliver What Conditional Probability Could Not Be. (http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/3865/hajekwhatcpcouldntbe.pdf). I think if I were to answer this again, I would choose his two papers with "arguments against frequentism" in the title. – Potato Mar 17 '18 at 03:18
3

One of the excellent book I have read is $\textbf{Euler's Gem}$ by David Richeson.

pritam
  • 10,157
1

I am currently reading A Mathematician's Apology by the famous mathematician G.H. Hardy. Here is a brief summary of the book :

Written in 1940 as his mathematical powers were declining, G.H. Hardy's apology offers an engaging account of the thoughts of a man known for his eccentricities as well as his brilliance in mathematics.

pitchounet
  • 6,576