100 Books Like Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

A primary reason to love math is because of its usefulness. This book shows two sides of math’s applicability, since it is so ubiquitously used in various algorithms.

On the one hand, such usage can be good, because statistical inferences can make our life easier and enrich it. On the other, when these are not properly designed or monitored, it can lead to catastrophic consequences. Mathematics is a powerful force, as powerful as wind or fire, and needs to be harnessed just as carefully.

Cathy O’Neil’s message in this book spoke deeply to me, reminding me that I need to be always vigilant about the subject I love not being deployed carelessly.  

Math is so much more than algebra.

Steve Strogatz is our generation’s poet laureate of math. I could not put this book down because, although I use math daily, I was amazed at how Strogatz connects everything to everyday experience. Just one example: Hardly anyone gets told about “group theory” in high school because it’s “too advanced”—but here we find it beautifully illustrated with the problem of flipping your mattress twice a year.

This book will help you have your own ideas by opening your eyes to a world of things that just make better sense through the lens of careful analysis, the interplay of the visual and the symbolic, and (just enough) abstraction.

This classic rumination on the nature of mathematics is perhaps the most famous book ever written by a mathematician.

I’ve read it several times, and each time, it brings up another facet of the subject in some new light. Portions of what Hardy says ring eerily true, and seem to be part of the identity, the very DNA, that all mathematicians must surely share. Other parts seem so alien to be almost repugnant – such as his contention that most mathematics we classify as useful is ugly and inelegant.

I’d love to argue face-to-face with Hardy about this highly opinionated work of his. In the end, I suspect we’d find lots of common ground, since intrinsically, we both love mathematics so much.

What I love about this book is that Christopher is such an unusual child and sees the world in ways that most of us do not.

In reading this bizarre and disturbing mystery story, we begin to see the world differently ourselves. I like, too, the fact that what is different about him is never named – it’s not some specific diagnosis or categorization – he is just Christopher, the odd, mathematically gifted, strangely reacting, teenager.

When he becomes terrified of what we might take as quite ordinary events and places, I begin to feel some of his difference – to feel what it might be like to be so much an outsider. It helped me to remember that we are all different.

This play is a total delight. Read it, of course, and then if it ever comes to a theatre anywhere near you, go see it!

It’s set in 1809 and the present-ish day, and features exuberant mathematical prodigy Thomasina Coverly, who definitely isn’t meant to be Ada Lovelace, says Tom Stoppard (but maybe she is a bit).

The dialogue is like the most invigorating dinner party conversation you ever had: it’s funny, it’s clever, it references fractals, Fermat’s Last Theorem, the silly competitiveness of academia, Lord Byron, landscape gardening, and a million other things. I love it. 

When the world ends, who will you turn to? For me, I’d turn to someone like Kainene in this book. Kainene isn’t beautiful, doesn’t play by the ridiculous rules of the feminine mystique, and is righteously bitter about a lot of things in her life. She’s also a guileless straight shooter people can count on, to tell the truth in any situation. That truth is never sugar-coated; it’s exactly what the characters in her life need to hear.

I love the bravery of her choice to keep her innermost thoughts private. I admire how steadfast she holds on to her commitment to what she believes will be a better future.

Too Much Happiness, the title story in a 2009 collection by Alice Munro, is a fictionalised account of the last days in the life of mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya.

What really grabbed me was the way Munro managed to express, with wonderful economy, the way that Kovalevskaya’s acceptance as a woman mathematician in the 19th century felt conditional – she won prizes but had to fight to get a job; if she travelled for work people would allude to the daughter at home who might need her: “a jab there, a suggestion familiar to her, of faulty motherhood”.

It’s a beautiful and poignant portrayal of a complicated, brilliant woman. 

I’ve read a whole bunch of books on the history of mathematics, but this is by far my favorite.

Singh uses the most famous problem in mathematics, called “Fermat’s Last Theorem” to give us a kaleidoscopic account of the subject, starting with the Greek greats like Pythagoras and Plato, and taking us all the way to Andrew Wiles, the contemporary mathematician who finally solved Fermat’s theorem after a few centuries’ worth of attempts.

The book truly gets to the heart of what drives mathematicians. It also is so full of delicious anecdotes and thoroughly engaging math puzzles that I simply couldn’t put it down. I especially love the fact that Singh shows how so much of mathematics came from non-European civilizations, a fact we often forget.

One way of enlivening any presentation of mathematics is by including some history of the subject, but this only really works if there is some serious scholarship behind it. I especially like Hollingdale's book, partly because of the concise writing style, and partly because of the unusually good balance between history and mathematics itself. The calculus, in all its various forms, with some aspects going right back to the Ancient Greeks, is treated especially well.

Frenkel came from the Soviet Union, where discrimination against Jews made it impossible for him to get into Moscow State University. During the oral exam they sent two graduate students to question him, pick holes in his responses, and ensure he failed. He turned to an informal network of Soviet mathematicians for help.

Like him, they were denied serious employment in the field, but after the 'cold war' against the Soviet Union, Harvard invited him to take a fellowship that later turned into a permanent job. Years later, when his old tormentor from Moscow State arrives to give a talk, he confronts the man in a lecture room with first-hand evidence of allegations against the system. Faced with a victim, the Russian mathematician's denials rang hollow. 

This book reaches beyond mathematics to anyone of independent thought in an environment where it is not permitted to step out of line or,… show more.