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> The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is a good resource... I think Princeton Companion to Physics curated by Frank Wilczek, a Nobelist, is due to be publis
by synthmeat 9y ago
> The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is a good resource...
I think Princeton Companion to Physics curated by Frank Wilczek, a Nobelist, is due to be published this year.
> Whoever reads it from cover to cover is my hero...
Yeah, I'd die an accomplished man if I would grok just a few books I treasure, amongst which are TPCTM and MICMAM.
> Don't just be a consumer but write something as soon as you're inspired.
Absolutely. That's why I recommend just a small amount of comprehensive resources. It's hard to get motivated by a pile of books complemented with synthetic problems related to a particular chapter. The idea is to just go about your daily life and start to slowly see more and more math problems everywhere around you; it does wonders to motivation.
- mtreis86 9y agoWhat is MICMAM? Whitepapers, lectures, and speech transcriptions are also good motivation, and useful resources. Sometimes overwhelming, especially if reading mathematical text is as a foreign language. And sometimes it takes you down a rabbit hole. My biggest block for learning math has really been all the unlearning. After a while ideas like negative numbers and zeros and processes like addition and subtraction stop making as much sense as I thought. Here is my favorite rabbit hole: http://www.turingarchive.org/viewer/?id=465&title=01 http://www.turingarchive.org/viewer/?id=465&title=01 leads to: http://www.digizeitschriften.de/dms/img/?PID=GDZPPN002278499&physid=phys735#navi http://www.digizeitschriften.de/dms/img/?PID=GDZPPN002278499... leads to: http://www.jamesrmeyer.com/pdfs/godel-original-english.pdf http://www.jamesrmeyer.com/pdfs/godel-original-english.pdf Where to go from there - philosophy or computation? Lambda calculus is only a couple clicks away. Lisp papers, perhaps?
- synthmeat 9y ago> What is MICMAM? Check my [1] at root. > Where to go from there - philosophy or computation? For me, there's plenty of fun in mathematics without venturing even near the edges of it. Maybe one day I'll grow bored of it, who knows - it's a lifelong process.
- mtreis86 9y agoI didn't mean to insinuate that the process I describe is one to be taken out of boredom. Let me try to explain what I am thinking: I have been studying lisp and wanted to understand more about the origins. So I went back to the beginning of the language and read the various McCarthy papers. But what he was thinking is not entirely clear to me. So I wonder, what papers was he studying himself when he wrote this? That is easy to answer as he put the references right there in the back of the paper for me to track down. So I start reading papers written by Church and Godel. I repeat this process recursively while looking for shared references. That network of interconnected papers is a treasure trove of useful information. Reading the same papers an author was reading during their writing process is a valuable way to expand your understanding of their work.