Plus Six More Here In Front Of Me

So I found the "/sale/Mathematics" stuff at Powell's and went a little nuts. Not as much as it might appear. A lot of 'em were pretty cheap. Anyway, in the spirit of this books-received-list (cum gesture of acknowledgement of my pre-blogging fanzine roots) of about a month ago, here we go.

Kiln People (David Brin) is the novel I went to Powell's to get in the first place. A hometown buddy I've been touching base with in F'book put this in a list of "ten books that influenced me" that was meme-ing around last week or so. David's recommended great stuff to me before... Chernev's 1000 Best Short Games comes to mind for some reason... so I figured what the heck. This one's a used mass-market, in real good shape. The first printing of the first Tor edition (December 2002). I know Brin only by reputation and little enough of that... only enough to say he's a "hard" SF man. A glance at his homepage and wikipdedia article has just told me a little more than this... because I wasn't confident enough even to post that with confirmation so close at hand and not know for sure... but I won't be researching his other stuff unless this one grabs me. No, wait. There was a book of reviews cited. I'm a sucker for those.

Felix Holt, the Radical (George Eliot) was the only other non-math entry in this shipment. Middlemarch I read several years ago; Scenes From Clerical Life just a few months ago; most of the other major works in between. "Victorian Novels" has been a slowly growing presence on my hit parade for the past twenty years or so and Eliot's right at the heart of that (Thackeray and Trollope are next; Dickens is of course in a class by himself). This one's the "Wordsworth Classics" (instant remainders) so it started out life cheap and I got it cheaper. It appears to've been read by someone who knows how to break the binding evenly... almost. So there's a little bit of a tilt to the spine. No big deal. I might even be able to correct it slightly by reading it even harder.

Mathematical Bafflers (Angela Dunn) is a personal classic that I haven't seen in book form since the Flood. The first problem is the classic Four Fours puzzle and it grabbed me at about age 10 like few problems then or since. The Mad1 too. I showed it to her last night and she just kept working out one after another. Usually she calculates only for practical purposes or as a way gratifying me, but this looked an awful lot like outright intellectual curiousity. The Litton Industries edition of 1964 is the one I knew as a kid; this is the 1980 Dover reissue (which... I think... I've never seen till now). I have a pamphlet of some of this material—with its distinctive woodcut graphics for each problem—that (I think) predates even the book itself (but doesn't include "four fours").

Symmetry and the Monster (Mark Ronan) is the story of, just as the subtitle has it, one of the greatest quests of mathematics—the classification of the finite simple groups. I was an Algebra major so a lot of the background will actually be familiar to me; as is often the case in these matters, my choice of this volume was influenced by a review in the Notices; this is the kind of thing that makes online shopping much more fun than I would've guessed (alas).

TO BE CONTINUED