Here is another older book out of my library, one to set alongside George Gamow’s One Two Three… Infinity, which I reviewed back in August. This book is even older. Published in 1940, this is Mathematics and the Imagination, by Edward Kasner and James R. Newman, with a Wikipedia page that oddly summarizes only the first four of its nine chapters. This book, like the Gamow, is still in print, from Dover. (The Amazon “Look Inside” samples includes the complete high-annotated table of contents.)
My edition, in the photo here, is a Simon & Schuster/Fireside trade paperback with a 1967 copyright. I bought it in 1980. After I’d graduated from college but before I began my aerospace job. I read it back then, and have spent a couple three hours paging through it this week in order to summarize here.*
Math, Existential Security, and Lots of Links
Abstract matters
NYT, Alec Wilkinson guest essay, 18 Sep 2022: Math Is the Great Secret
This is by the man who wrote a book, published earlier this year, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age, about learning those topics in his 60s.
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