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A better question: What books made you significantly better at math that are also genuinely FUN to learn from?

I find that my biggest barrier to learning math has always been how unengaging, excessively contrived, and unfun the learning material has been.

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David Bressoud’s 4 books on calculus/analysis are the most engaging math books I’ve ever read. He uses the history of mathematics to drive the narrative and it’s an enlightening approach. However, this means certain theorems often taught in undergrad analysis are delayed until his “graduate” book and his graduate book would not be sufficient for passing many universities analysis quals. But the context and history he gives is fantastic.

I always recommend Bressoud's measure theory/integration text as a supplement the first graduate course in analysis. His discussion of weird and pathological sets of reals such as fat Cantor sets are really helpful for building intuition.

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