For the last four years I’ve been working on a book for programmers who want to learn mathematics. It’s finally done, and you can buy it today.
The website for the book is pimbook.org, which has purchase links—paperback and ebook—and a preview of the first pages. You can see more snippets later in the book on the Amazon listing’s “Look Inside” feature.
If you’re a programmer who wants to learn math, this book is written specifically for you! Why? Because programming and math are naturally complementary, and programmers have a leg up in learning math. Many of the underlying modes of thought in mathematics are present in programming, or are otherwise easy to explain by analogies and contrasts to familiar concepts in software. I leverage that in the book so that you can internalize the insights quickly, and appreciate the nuance more deeply than most books can allow. This book is a bridge from the world of programming to the world of math from the mathematician’s perspective. As far as I know, no other book provides this.
Programs make math more interesting and applicable than otherwise. Typical math writers often hold computation and algorithms at a healthy distance. Not us. We embrace computation as a prize and a principle worth fighting for. Each chapter of the book culminates in an exciting program that applies the mathematical insights from the chapter to an interesting application. The applications include cryptographic schemes, machine learning, drawing hyperbolic tessellations, and a Nobel-prize winning algorithm from economics.
The exercises of the book also push you beyond the book itself. There’s so much math out there that you can’t learn it from a single book. Perspectives and elaborations are spread throughout books, papers, blog posts, wikis, lecture notes, math magazines, and your own scratch paper. This book will prepare you to read a variety of sources by introducing you to the standard language of math, and also push you to engage with those resources.
Finally, this book includes a healthy dose of culture. Quotes and passages from the writings of famous mathematicians, contextual explanations of cultural attitudes, and a light dose of history will provide a peek into why mathematics is the way it is today, and why at times it can seem so confounding to an outsider. Through all this, I will show what progress means for math, what attitudes and patterns will help you along the way, and how to stay sane.
Of course, I couldn’t have written the book without the encouragement and support of you, my readers. Thank you for reading, commenting, and supporting me all these years.
Order the book today! I can’t wait to hear what you think 🙂
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