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Comment by nevi-me | Hacker News Reader

My last math was in high school, and I'd like to spend more time learning in the coming year. I often read research papers, and the biggest challenge for me is the notation. I can understand the stuff around set theory, and a bit of the sigma notation here and there.

What I'd like is a proper introduction so I can start learning properly. Any book one would recommend? I'm keen on buying if it's not on the Springer list. Thanks in advance.

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'What Is Mathematics?' Second Edition by Courant, Robbins & Stewart[0] is a great introduction to Mathematics in general (And covers most of the main fields), but also (iirc) is good at describing the notation used. As well as that I find Wolfram Alpha[1] and Math As Code[2] good at describing some pieces of notation.

Other introductory books I've found very useful are the 'Dover Books on Mathematics' introductions series, I've found their graph theory[3] and topology[4] books rather concise and clear to read -- to my knowledge they're availible at archive.org in the collection 'folkscanomy mathematics'[5].

[0]: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mathematics-Elementary-Approach-Meth...

[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/

[2]: https://github.com/Jam3/math-as-code

[3]: https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToGraphTheory

[4]: https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToTopology

[5]: https://archive.org/details/folkscanomy_mathematics

Thanks for the info, I am going to have a look at them and see where the road leads

No problem, happy to help :D

Good luck!

I don't recommend pursuing this unless you have many years to study diligently. My email is in my profile if you have any specific questions: I can recommend a path to take depending on what your goals are and give you a realistic timeline.

Thanks, I'll get in touch :)

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