If you can find a way to get a hold of it, Saunders MacLane's Mathematics: Form and Function is a tremendous book for understanding how math arises from the wor

If you can find a way to get a hold of it, Saunders MacLane's Mathematics: Form and Function is a tremendous book for understanding how math arises from the world and reflects it. What's written here is a lot more specific than that, of course, but if this illustration interests you then it might be a good book to try digging into a little bit. On the other hand, while I am always cognizant and amazed by the POV of math as a human construction, there's something a little otherworldly about it from time to time. In the same way that you sometimes hit a code design which feels so damn good, Math, especially older math, is just a huge collection of these. Somehow, despite this all coming, apparently, from our minds, we hit on these design decisions that are just so sweet that they last millennia. This is what inspired things like Voyager---maybe it's hubris, but it just has to be the case that aliens speak mathematics. So, I encourage anyone excited by this: math isn't "hard", it's just big and wonderful. You'll never finish learning it, but the journey will be incredible. I'll leave this linking two more great resources (edit: to be clear, really the first one is the great resource... the second is just me talking, not really great at all). First, Paul Erdös, a famous mathematician who perhaps specialized in combinatorics, loved this idea I espouse above. In his mind, God had a small number of "proofs" in his mind when he designed mathematics. These are so wonderful that their beauty is completely self-evident. After Erdös "stopped doing math" (passed away) people compiled some of his Proofs from The Book along with others they imagine he would have so regarded into a great text book called, unsurprisingly, Proofs from The Book [0]. Finally, I'll self plug a little essay I wrote, actually in another HN comment, a while ago about learning mathematics. http://jspha.com/posts/there_is_no_royal_road_to_mathematics/ http://jspha.com/posts/there_is_no_royal_road_to_mathematics... [0] http://www.amazon.com/Proofs-THE-BOOK-Martin-Aigner/dp/3642008550 http://www.amazon.com/Proofs-THE-BOOK-Martin-Aigner/dp/36420...