My Math Bookshelf

Recently I cleaned up my public catalog of math books in my personal library as part of a larger effort to scrub and cross-link various public profiles: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. I use LibraryThing for my public catalog, but I've maintained my own private book catalog in a Lotus Notes database for almost twenty years. I've ported about two-thirds of my catalog into LibraryThing, including 164 entries tagged as "mathematics". Some of these are also tagged as "borrowed", indicating they are library books, not owned by me.

About a third of the math books are textbooks, some from my wife, some from my son, some recent acquisitions, some from my college days in the 70s. The rest are a mixture of history, biography, philosophy, math in popular culture, and recreational math. The author most represented is Martin Gardner. The book I've owned the longest is Courant and Robbins' What Is Mathematics? which was a present from my father on my 16th birthday. Other favorite authors include George Pólya, Philip Davis, Morris Kline, Douglas Hofstadter, and Keith Devlin.

Most of the books are unread: the collection represents aspirations, not accomplishments.

Martin Gardner, 1914-2010: A Personal Remembrance

Martin Gardner died this past weekend. I was a great admirer of his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American and spent hours as a teenager in the stacks at the local college library perusing back issues and resolving to attempt every single game and puzzle. The column for March 1967 on "Dragon Curves" especially gripped me and has remained a source of fascination ever since.