Sweet Bean Paste
I picked this book up mostly because it was a book that I was reading about from some other blog. Ben Orlin is a math teacher who one day found himself drawing a really bad stick figure picture to illustrate a math point to his class of high schoolers and of course getting ridiculed mercilessly by his students. Affectionately so, he might add.
But he IS a really good explainer and the book goes through a lot of both simple stuff like statistics, to geometry (there’s a reason you can only tile using hexagons, triangles, or squares), something like pentagons are impossible to tile with because the internal angle of a regular pentagon, 108°, is not a divisor of 360°. this was an impossibly cool fact that I didn’t think or know about. =)
Another fun subject he goes into is on the subject of statistics, which is a great overview of things like standard deviation, averages, means, and the value of sample sizes.
All in all, I found this to be a great read and well worth the time. the author explains things clearly, giving great examples, and finds way to make math fun and relevant because lets face it, everything we do in life, including this computer you’re reading on, is done with math as the base.