good physical insight into what’s going on in some system is far more useful than an unintelligible exact
result.”
Probability Theory: A Concise Courseby Rozanov. Dover Starts at the beginning and goes a long
way in 148 pages. Clear and explicit and cheap.
Calculus of Variationsby MacCluer. Pearson Both clear and rigorous, showing how many different
types of problems come under this rubric, even “...operations research, a field begun by mathemati-
cians, almost immediately abandoned to other disciplines once the field was determined to be useful
and profitable.”
Special Functions and Their Applicationsby Lebedev. Dover The most important of the special
functions developed in order to be useful, not just for sport.
The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometryby Wells. Penguin Just for fun. If
your heart beats faster at the sight of the Pythagorean Theorem, wait ’til you’ve seen Morley’s Theorem,
or Napoleon’s, or when you first encounter an unduloid in its native habitat.
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