Which mathematics books taught you the most in your career?

Definitely “Seven Sketches in Compositionality”! [1]

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[1] https://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp18/7Sketches.pdf

Professional mathematician (but in business, not academia). I hold a PhD in mathematical physics. Below the list of books that taught me the most. However, these books are often not directly related to my current work. Also, I don't think they will be useful for everyone, as some of them are strong specialized books. These books mostly taught me to think like a mathematician. One of the strongest skills I learned as a mathematician is to dive deep into a topic and learn almost everything that you can learn about it (going from 80% of knowledge to 99.9%). I "read" these books completely several times in my career.

* Atiyah, Macdonald - Introduction to Commutative Algebra.

* Bourbaki (in French).

* Gasper, Rahman - Basic Hypergeometric Functions.

* Hasti et al - Elements Of Statistical Learning.

* Rudin - Real & Complex Analysis.

* Thomas, Thomas - Elements of Information Theory.

Bit of a brain dump here. Serre's Trees was pretty relevant to my studies, though left quite a few gaps for the reader to fill in.

Meier's Groups, Graphs and Trees is much more accessible and visual. Strongly recommended!

Knuth's notes on how to write mathematics well [1] were very influential.

Munkres' Topology is a classic, but I think I leaned more on Hatcher's Algebraic Topology towards the end.

Drobot's Formal Languages and Automata Theory was a lot of fun to self-study.

The Graduate Texts in Mathematics series was always reliable in my experience.

[1]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/klr.html

Statistics by Roger Purves, David Freedman, Robert Pisani

Introduction to Linear Algebra, by Gilbert Strang

A lot of my learning was self study. These books were very helpful to me.

Elements of Statistical Learning

Software Foundations (https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/)

The Foundations of Mathematics - Ian Stewart.

I wouldn't say it taught me the most, but more like it opened the door so I could learn the most out of everything after it.

For me it was Apostol's Calculus Vol 1 and Vol 2.

I am searching for books in mathematics that teach both the how and the why, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31650459

I hope to get some insightful answers soon.

Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz

Rudin's Real & Complex Analysis.

Statistics for six sigma quality control.