HACKER Q&A
📣 srinathkrishna

What are some fundamental books in math/sciences/art/social sciences?


I'm looking for some suggestions around the fundamental and absolute basic books that one can refer to for elementary to pre-univ education reference. I'm specifically looking for math/science/social sciences/literature and language (English)/art - the usual curriculum in schools. These could be ideally one book like (https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Physics-Understandable-Practical-Reality/dp/0935218084) or a handful. I'm not looking to be an expert - just looking to refresh myself in the absolute fundamentals of the various fields. I didn't do my schooling in the US but I'd love to read these to (re)acquaint myself.

  👤 sweatandgrime Accepted Answer ✓
The book you linked to is really cool. I like it.

Math alone is GIGANTIFIC! To working mathematicians pre-university math is not fundamental. I hate saying this, but high school math is not even considered "actual" math. Even undergrad curriculum is just a sampling of pieces and bits of what's to come in grad school where you get to look at things a bit deeper. But even after grad school it's still very hard to say you know all the fundamentals of math. You might come out a capable differential geometer (after grad school), but that doesn't mean you'd know the, uh, the "fundamentals" of, say, number theory past the undergrad level (which, frankly, is not enough to say you know the fundamentals of the subject).

That said, not all is lost. All aspiring mathematicians must start somewhere. You can start here [0]

[0] BOOK OF PROOF by Richard Hammach.

https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/

Prerequisite for reading [0] is math at the level of, say, 7th-grade. Basically, all you need to know is some elementary algebra. The material in [0] is what all math people must know.

👤 zeruch
Art: Gardner's "Art Through the Ages" as an overview in terms of art history. If you are looking for technique I couldn't recommend just one.

Political Science is tough, because there are plenty of decent primers, but there are enough sub-specialties that they each have their own pillars. Conversely, you can go for a lot of the 'classics' (e.g. Plato's "Republic", Hobbe's "Leviathan", Locke's "Two Treatises" etc)

👤 TheAdamAndChe
I've been using openstax[1] to learn math prerequisites for a CS program. They have peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks[2] on many college courses.

[1] https://openstax.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStax

👤 ImaTigger
This is a pretty broad request. esp. not knowing you well enough to be able to tell what level you can handle/want. I suggest going to the local library and skimming the collections. If you have a half-decent local library they'll have a half decent collection in each of these fields.
👤 x220
For anyone interested in psychology, reading The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker is a good introduction to many fundamental ideas of psychology and an overview of the problems that consciousness gives us and how humans handle those problems.