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While the idea itself is worthwhile, I didn't see any explanation why these books and not others were selected, and no underlying structure to the choices made
by anatoly 16y ago
While the idea itself is worthwhile, I didn't see any explanation why these books and not others were selected, and no underlying structure to the choices made by the author. He also frequently lists several books covering the same topic without mentioning how they differ from each other.
I have previously seen two similar lists that are in my opinion better than this one:
John Baez, How To Learn Math And Physics http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html
Gerard 't Hooft, How To Become A Good Theoretical Physicist
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html
- shogunmike 16y agoIndeed, I should elaborate on the differences between the books. I'm quite keen to expand the post based on the comments relayed here. It's all very useful critique! I also agree that those two lists are excellent - thank you for bringing them to my attention. One important aspect I have neglected is Statistical Mechanics. I'm not familiar with that area, being more of an applied maths guy.
- sz 16y agoAlso maybe put the authors in the link text to avoid having to click through? Titles really don't help distinguish between these books.
- sz 16y agoJohn Baez rocks. In general. All of his stuff is great and his writing style will cheer you up when you feel like you need to go back to freshman calculus. I read some of his pieces on Lie algebras and A-D-E classifications. Very helpful.
- anatoly 16y agoBaez is awesome. I used to follow his news-in-mathematical-physics digests back in the 90ies (basically a blog years before there were blogs); sadly almost everything went over my head. I dream of finding time and stamina to study enough background material to understand his Rosetta stone paper well.