Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
Honestly, unless you&#x27;re very gifted, a book on its own is not going to be enough to really develop your skills. You need to work interactively with a teacher. Getting a degree in math is a good start, but even then it will be limited if you don&#x27;t work with other people, go to office hours, form relationships with professors---embed yourself in the culture, so to speak. I think getting engaged with an online community like MathOverflow or similar could be a substitute for this.<p>IMO, programming is &quot;easier&quot; to learn on your own for a few major reasons:<p>1) The sorts of things most people are interested in building just aren&#x27;t  unforgiving intellectually in the same way that math is.<p>2) You have a compiler to check if you&#x27;re right, and your code will often still work even if it&#x27;s &quot;wrong&quot; (not as efficient as it could be, has unwanted side effects, etc.). In some sense the compiler is a bit like a teacher this way.<p>3) With programming, you can upload and make it available for free, and whether it&#x27;s legit or not is largely disconnected from your pedigree or how &quot;correct&quot; it is. This makes programming far more accessible. This makes sense considering that programming is primarily a practical tool. On the other hand, mathematics is primarily a field of scientific inquiry and is judged by different standards. If you learn a bit of math, try to write a paper, submit it to the arXiv... well, people will probably think you&#x27;re a crank.<p>On the other hand, if you&#x27;re just interested in math for the love of the game... you can certainly pick up a book and read it, maybe work some problems, but I think at this point it&#x27;s quite easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand more than you actually do. I guess there&#x27;s no real harm in being a charlatan, but probably the average person is interested in having some kind of real relationship with mathematics that they can be confident has a firm foundation. I&#x27;m very skeptical most people can truly pull this off by just reading books and not actually going to school.<p>---<p>As an aside, I think the fetishization of math in programming communities is very interesting...