by Mark C. Chu-Carroll

What if you were curious about some higher level math but didn’t have the will or intention to study it just out of curiosity? What if you could ask a skilled mathematician to break down the concepts for you and explain in an approachable, clear way? That’s exactly what this book is.

From the get-go, we are exposed to Peano Arithmetic, and new concepts get introduced bit by bit based on that resulting in explanations about natural, real and irrational numbers, not in terms of their nature, but how one may build them from axioms and use them.

The second half of the book talks about logic, sets, group theory and finally the approaches to computation: finite state machines, the Turing machine and lambda calculus.

For a programmer, it’s a relatively shallow but enticing introduction to the topics he or she might learn in greater detail to understand how computers work and the math behind it.

This book can’t be compared to actual math books, but reading it and having the gist and a modicum of understanding of what’s out there – and motivation to learn it one day – is, I think, exactly what the author’s intended.