I want to be a mathematician
by Paul R. Halmos · first published 1985
60% recommend40% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Halmos's memoir traces his path into mathematics and offers a candid view of how mathematicians work. Its engaging writing also appeals to readers who are not mathematicians.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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This quote is from Halmos' "automathography", I Want To Be A Mathematician. I loved reading this book (though I'm no mathematician). http://www.amazon.com/I-Want-Be-Mathematician-Automathograph...
on “"Don't just read it; fight it"” ↗Great suggestions! Two more must read books: 1. "The Mathematical Experience" by Davis and Hersh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Experience#cit...) 2. "I Want To Be a Mathematician" (http://www.amazon.com/I-Want-Be-Mathematician-Automathograph...). Probably the key thing for me in helping my math ability was to actively try to prove theorems. Before reading a proof, I always try…
on “Ask HN: How Do I Get Math?” ↗I have read and enjoyed some of the other books already mentioned and would add: * Paul R. Halmos's "I Want to Be a Mathematician... an automathography: http://www.amazon.com/Want-Be-Mathematician-Automathography-... * Frederick Mosteller's "The Pleasures of Statistics: The Autobiography of Frederick Mosteller": http://www.amazon.com/Pleasures-Statistics-Autobiography-Fre...
on “‘The Fractalist,’ Benoit B. Mandelbrot’s Math Memoir” ↗"I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography" -- http://www.amazon.com/Want-Mathematician-An-Automathography/... This was a very influential book for me in just thinking about what it would be like to do math for a career.…
on “What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?” ↗For anyone looking for more of Halmos, his book "I want to be a mathematician: an automathography" is worth a look. Also well worth a look is Serre's "How to write mathematics badly": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQyFzzBHlo
on “How to write Mathematics (1970) [pdf]” ↗Because Paul Halmos was an exceptionally good writer. (I greatly enjoyed his "automathography" called "I want to be a mathematician", though it will probably appeal significantly less to people who aren't mathematicians themselves. See also his article "How to write mathematics" at https://www.math.toronto.edu/mgsa/assets/teaching-seminar/ho....)…
on “The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]” ↗I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography Paul Richard Halmos
on “Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?” ↗…'set of the first category' is bad) and the proper way to baptize theorems (why 'the closed graph theorem' is good and 'the Cauchy-Buniakowksy-Schwarz theorem' is bad)." I thought he'd said more in "I Want to be a Mathematician" (https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387960784), but I just looked through the book and couldn't find anything. (Halmos was a particularist, and thought very highly of examples, and "I Want to be a…
on “Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other” ↗It might be Paul Halmos. In his "automathobiography", titled I Want to Be a Mathematician (Springer 1985), page 156: "In the late 1940's I began to act on one of my beliefs: to stay young, you have to change fields every five years". He goes on saying "I didn't first discover it and then…
on “The Future of Computer Science (2018)” ↗…your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis? — Paul Halmos, “I Want to Be a Mathematician”, Study. Some books simply built around this protocol, some are making it “easier” so they’re more popular and sell more.
on “The early History of the Singular Value Decomposition (1993) [pdf]” ↗…this thread are reading the headline and/or reading the article as outside the context of mathematics. This is Terry Tao's blog and not a VC's microblog. The very first block of text is a quote from "I want to be a mathematician". He is purely talking about how to approach mathematics at a level sufficiently close to the frontier. What he is saying is that when you are taught something like optimization theory, the definition…
on “Ask yourself dumb questions and answer them (2020)” ↗