Geometry and the imagination

Mentions per year

What Hacker News says

• earthicus · Feb 16, 2019 · Recommends

  …beginning of the 20th century so are slightly outdated, but kline was extremely forward-looking in his point of view. Courant & Robbins - What is Mathemaics. Another classic. Hilbert & Cohn-Vossen - Geometry and the Imagination. The gold standard of popular mathematics writing. A beautiful book.

  on “Classic Mathematics Books for Lifelong Learners” ↗
• enriquto · Jan 19, 2023 · Recommends

  The classical stuff is great: * Geometry and the imagination by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen * Methods of mathematical physics by Courant and Hilbert * A comprehensive introduction to differential geometry by Spivak (and its little brothers Calculus and Calculus on…

  on “Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?” ↗
• arvid · Feb 4, 2008 · Recommends

  …should read Calculus on Manifolds. If you want to learn from the masters and you have the confidence, audacity and intelligence. I would suggest Fundamentals of Abstract Analysis by Andrew Gleason and Geometry and the Imagination by David Hilbert. Just a warning. These books are for people adept at mathematics and are willing to spend hours on a page or two. If you are not, then avoid these books.

  on “Learning Math” ↗
• enriquto · Oct 25, 2019 · Recommends

  All the books cited here by Arnold, Spivak, and Lanczos are extraordinarily good. Nobody has mentioned yet "Geometry and the Imagination" by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen. If there is a Feynman equivalent in math it is certainly this book. For elementary geometry, the Feynman equivalent is probably "Introduction to Geometry", by H.S.M.Coxeter.…

  on “Ask HN: Are there books for mathematics like Feynman's lectures on physics?” ↗
• enriquto · Jul 3, 2020 · Recommends

  …to have around, but you do not really read it end to end. Spivak's calculus you bring to the beach and read it between swim and swim. EDIT: Also, some books by Hilbert are breathtakingly beautiful: Geometry and the Imagination (just the chapter on synthetic differential geometry is worth more than 10 other great books), and the Methods of Mathematical Physics is also great. It begins by giving three proofs of cauchy-schwartz…

  on “Ask HN: Recommend a maths book for a teenager?” ↗
• chkhd · Jan 19, 2023 · Recommends

  …https://www.amazon.com/How-Prove-Structured-Approach-2nd/dp/... helped strengthen that understanding. * This year I am trying to master https://www.amazon.com/Methods-Mathematics-Calculus-Probabil... which focuses on how to "connect the dots". * I am using Geometry and the Imagination by Hilbert https://www.amazon.com/Geometry-Imagination-AMS-Chelsea-Publ... as an attempt to "immerse" myself in Geometry. I just love this book.

  on “Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?” ↗
• eimrine · Aug 31, 2024 · Recommends

  …important in methodical approach mathematical books are almost unknown to students here (and, seems to me, have not been translated into French). Among these are Numbers and figures by Rademacher and Töplitz, Geometry and the imagination by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen, What is mathematics? by Courant and Robbins, How to solve it and Mathematics and plausible reasoning by Polya, Development of mathematics in the 19th century by F. Klein.

  on “Teaching Mathematics” ↗
• adalacelove · Dec 31, 2024 · Recommends

  Nice book. For another old but excellent math book I recommend Geometry and the Imagination by David Hilbert. No gutenberg remake I'm afraid, maybe because of the numerous (and incredibly high quality) illustrations.

  on ““A Course of Pure Mathematics” – G. H. Hardy (1921) [pdf]” ↗
• debatem1 · Jul 27, 2018 · Recommends

  I was once in your shoes. Here are the books that helped me out of that spot. I recommend them in this order. 1/ Geometry and the Imagination. Yes, it's geometry. Yes, it's written in a somewhat older style. No, it doesn't do a lot of hand-holding. But if you can spend the time to really understand the dazzling intellectual fireworks going…

  on “The Best Textbooks on Every Subject” ↗
• WillAdams · Jan 16, 2025 · Mentions

  …version at: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing and I think that the rigor which it imparts is a good thing (but ask me that again after I've finished reading Hilbert/Cohn-Vossen's _Geometry and the Imagination_ which I just ordered from the AMS) --- after that I need to read _Projective Geometric Algebra Illuminated_ by Eric Lengyel and hopefully out of all this I'll arrive at the understanding I need to finish…

  on “Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)” ↗
• WillAdams · Jan 28, 2025 · Mentions

  …has pretty much devolved to putting a UI on various trigonometric functions and allowing the user to program them, I'd be very glad of other resources in this space (currently working through Hilbert's _Geometry and the Imagination_ and the book which matches https://projectivegeometricalgebra.org/ and just finished the _Make:Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus_ series, and have had recommended Curves and Surfaces for CAGD: A Practical…

  on “Desmos Animated Graphing Calculator” ↗
• westoncb · Jul 27, 2018 · Critical

  As a counterpoint, I have decent math chops and even do a lot of computational geometry professionally, and I really wanted to like "Geometry and the Imagination"—but for me I was till missing way too much information to figure out what he was saying half the time (much of because of the antiquated style), and after putting lots of work into some section I'd get…

  on “The Best Textbooks on Every Subject” ↗
• photon_lines · Dec 17, 2019 · Mentions

  …Princeton Companion to Mathematics - The Art and Craft of Problem Solving - Div, Grad, Curl and all that - Visual Complex Analysis - Ordinary Differential Equations - Mathematics and Its History - Geometry and the Imagination - Introduction to Electrodynamics - Penrose's Road to Reality

  on “Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?” ↗