Alright, I'm sure as crazy-smart Warwick mathematicians we've all read a few maths books for fun; maybe about advanced or interesting topics, or books discussing the nature of the subject. Which book would you recommend EVERYONE interested in maths or science read?

For me it has to be Flatland. I've made so many people read it that I've started to buy in cheap (£1.50!) copies from amazon to give away. For anyone who hasn't heard of it, it's a story about a two-dimensional square who gets a visit from a sphere. It's also online from Project Gutenberg, so definitely track it down.

One I've just finished reading is Godel, Escher, Bach. It's a bit of an epic, this one, with over 700 pages of some mind-breaking topics. Really hard to explain this one, because it covers so much. It deals with self-reference, and how it's not necessarily a nonsense idea. It alludes to a proof (Godel's Incompleteness theorem) that mathematics is incomplete (noooooooooooooooooooo) and just has a ton of really interesting things which will play on your mind. It definitely did change the way I think about things.

Any thoughts on the books I've mentioned, or have some of your own? I'm looking for a new read (after I finish Intuitive Topology, that I got from the library today, hehe)

Sorry I deleted the spam, when i should have unpublished it by mistake, so drupal removed all the replies too.

Whoops.
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Regards
Steven Jones

Is 1 year 33 weeks of idleness a bit too much for me to get away with bumping a thread? This isn't strictly a "books" thing which I've only just understood, but I mentioned recently that I've been mucking about with a Toaster. You know that they say the centre slices of bread are fixed? It only just dawned on me that they are fixed in position, but not in orientation. I only realised that because my loaf has "hovis" printed on the white centre slice. I scrambled it, toasted it, then spotted that that slice had swivelled round.

In retrospect I've no excuse at all for not having figured that out earlier. Some weeks back Chris Smith was playing about with his toaster in the workroom. He was picking various combinations of twists and finding out how many repetitions of those combinations it took to return the bread to its identity state (the solved state). If I remember rightly, one of those combinations, consisting of consecutive quarter turns of adjacent slices, had order 63. 63 isn't divisible by two, let alone four, so you'd think I'd have noticed what must have happened to the crusts of those slices. But no, it had to wait until there was physical evidence in front of me before it became clear to me that this could happen. Thick sliced or what?

It's happened again, although not quite as bad this time. If you read the third post, you'll spot the word toaster appearing out of nowhere. I certainly didn't type that. Who's mucking about with my forum posts? I don't mind much but I don't seem to be able to do that myself, which means that it must be something only the exec can do. Does it bother you that you can narrow down the list of suspects to maybe three or four?

Okay, this post is mainly intended for anyone who doesn't usually get involved in the forums and who may casually reading this thread, not without a little disgust. I'd like to apologise for the mind games that are going on here. The reason I'm apologising for this is that, if my suspicions are correct, the motivations behind it stem from a ill-thought-through comment that I made about this time last month.

I don't intend to go into this now, as I need a good night's sleep before tomorrow's toasting. Neither do I intend to get involved in any prattle on the forums.

This clearly isn't at all helpful but I just wanted to tell you how much I loved the post. I might keep it for some time to come.

"I don't intend to go into this now, as I need a good night's sleep before tomorrow's toasting"

HAH, love it!

Ah so we're picking on the details, that's the game? Well, much of the essay seems to convey to me that what little toaster intuition I have is nowhere near reliable enough to be of much worth. At which point I find myself invited to imagine how the eiffel tower might be toasted. I'm evidently supposed to have some idea, but frankly I could imagine practically anything.

Meanwhile, this is beside his point but

Now the toast got stronger (and heavier) as it went down.

I can't decide whether I think he means 'towards the bottom' or 'during the toasting'. The first one seems more plausible to me but for all I can tell, the second may make just as much sense.

I had toast for breakfast this morning.

You know, whoever's done it this time, that's not really fair as I can't eat toast right now. Also, I can't remember exactly what I ate originally and I can only correct the toast by manually editing it back to what it was before. Please tell me that the toast can somehow be reverted?

What the heck is all this? This is getting a bit wierd. All I gather is that somebody is winding Colin up with something about toast.

You'd be correct, also can't be bothered to start another post so... Can anyone remember seeing a graph which had all the modules on it with arrows describing pre-requisites etc or did i imagine it because i can't find it anywhere.

It used to be in the PYDC orange book I think, I can't see it there anymore.

I thought it was something like that but I checked all the pydc but it wasn't in any of them. never mind.

Actually I just got of my ass to look in my copy and it is there. I could scan it in, but I'm too lazy to have a scanner.