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I am looking for the introductory books on mathematics as light reading, story, novel, enlightenment, entertainment,not text or dictionary. Please introduce many books and the reason they are good.

mynameisjohn
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    What do you mean by introductory? For a pre-schooler, high schooler, graduate mathematics student, amateur? – tomasz Jun 21 '13 at 23:07
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    Can you be more specific? There's too many to list, and whether or not you would consider it "light reading" or "entertainment" depends on what you're interested in. – rurouniwallace Jun 21 '13 at 23:09
  • http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/8231.Best_Books_About_Mathematics – Amzoti Jun 21 '13 at 23:57

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I recommend Clifton Fadiman's anthologies Fantasia Mathematica and The Mathematical Magpie, Eric Temple Bell's popularizations, the works of Martin Gardner, and the website http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/

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I recommend the books of Amir Aczel, especially The Artist and the Mathematician: The Story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed. In it, you will learn about many important mathematicians of the second half of the twentieth century (e.g. Serre, Weil, Grothendieck). But the best facet of this book is when the author explains how the Bourbaki philosophy is very much inscribed in the XXth century, through structuralism. Very enlightening!

M Turgeon
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I enjoyed Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio. The text is roughly about the question "is math created or discovered". You get to learn math from many eras in a non-technical descriptive fashion. I would categorize this one as enlightenment.

James S. Cook
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