For CS, it was SICP. I read it in high school (accompanied with the lecture series[0]) and it lead to me learning about functional and logic programming, compi

For CS, it was SICP. I read it in high school (accompanied with the lecture series[0]) and it lead to me learning about functional and logic programming, compilation, algorithms and data structures and more. It was more than enough to prepare myself for university, and even in my third year some topics have not been covered to the depth they are in SICP! For math, it was Gödel, Escher, Bach. I was into mathematics in high school as well, but did not have a proper teacher at the time so I was stuck on trying to absorb some of the more technical undergraduate texts in abstract algebra. However, GEB was at the right level and had a nice layman explanation of the 2nd incompleteness theorem, along with beautiful exposition into philosophy, computer science, math, art, music and cognition. I enjoyed it so much I even wrote a compiler for the programming language in the book to C.[1] The exposition on formal reasoning also got me started in learning the Coq theorem prover, which I continue to use to this day. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PLE18841CABEA24090&index=21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PLE18841CAB... [1] https://github.com/siraben/meta-yacc https://github.com/siraben/meta-yacc