Book Recommendation: Concepts of Modern Mathematics
As far as I can remember, I was like most students and scared of math. Math was that scary and difficult subject that made you feel anxious about its problems in mid-term and final exams, and it resulted in the lowest score on your report card, leaving you feeling bad because you weren’t smart enough. Also, you couldn’t compensate for it with your scores in science or history. Nevertheless, I had a general interest in science.
The first time I went to the library, instead of the usual scientific books, my eyes caught a book called “Concepts of Modern Mathematics” My first thought was, “Does math have old and modern?” Flipping through the pages of the book, I found no scary formulas or equations and tried to read them. The book presented itself as a story to me. The idea is that you can open a math book and feel like you’re reading an adventure novel, by showing where each mathematical concept began and how our understanding of very basic concepts has changed, even those we may not think about and take for granted. The book starts with the fundamental question of what mathematics is, whether there are any limitations to mathematics, and what the true meaning of mathematical truth is. Then it changes to interesting concepts such as topology, algebra, and group theory!
If you think to yourself, “What’s the point of knowing all this math?” The benefits of such a study should be at least an improvement in your math and physics grades, like me, whose math score changed from the lowest grades in middle school to the highest grades in high school. But even without getting into the details of formulas, reading math can change your way of thinking about problems, and by problems, I don’t just mean math problems, but everyday thinking. This impact has been so profound for me to the point where I felt like I needed such a book on my bookshelf and flip through it occasionally. Therefore, I ordered the English version of the book
The book is written by Ian Stewart and translated by Jamshid Parvizi. The translation is very fluent, simple, and accurate. Ian Stewart is a professor at the University of Warwick and a graduate of Cambridge. He is one of the few popular science writers who write best-selling books in mathematics and is known as a renowned mathematician himself. He has many other books in the field of science that have almost never been translated into Farsi.