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My daughter is 14 and really into maths right now. She's already thinking about studying mathematics. I'd love that, and I'd love to help her, so I thought this forum might be the right one to ask for interesting mathematics books for kids. I don't think that a book with a lot of exercises might be the best thing but books ABOUT maths. Like how math is used in "the real world", or what interesting things we found out with the help of maths. "Stuff" like that. Sorry if I'm wrong here and thanks for the feedback.

Digitallis
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Max Mustemal
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I used to be such a teenager too, but your reaction would have spooked me: "math ... used in "the real world"": it obviously depends on your daughter herself, but sometimes teenage "mathematicians" are more interested in recreational mathematics (like the books from Martin Gardner, The Lady or The Tiger, The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers by David Wells, The Fourth Dimension by Rudy Rucker, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, ...) (although those last ones might be too heavy for a fourteen-year old).

Dominique
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    Personally, what drew me into mathematics is the "slightly more abstract math" like the questions about sequences and series. Especially recursive sequences were always interesting to me. I started learning those from the monographs by Sierpiński, which are in Polish. – Jakobian Sep 26 '23 at 12:31
  • @Jakobian: ... and so you set your first steps into chaos theory :-) – Dominique Sep 26 '23 at 12:32
  • Those things are still interesting to me, but somehow never got into dynamics and chaos theory. What interests me the most nowadays are things in topology where set theory somehow plays a part. – Jakobian Sep 26 '23 at 12:38
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I am a third year maths student right now, and my decision to pursue maths has been highly influenced by the book "The Road To Reality" by Roger Penrose. I read the book at 17 and barely understood anything, the book is meant for a general public, but the truth is that he goes into crazy technical details and very VERY advanced topics. Nevertheless, I remember getting lost in the indecipherable symbolism, and what the book taught me is that I really wanted to learn the subject. It presented me mathematics without boiling it down, forcing me to admit that it was a life goal for me to get to a point where I could understand what at the time was incomprehensible (and mostly still is now). The fact that the book is so technical has the possible disadvantage of scaring away, but the great merit of showing modern mathematics (and physics I should say) for what it really is. Maybe 14 is too young, but reading your post brought me back to a very exciting moment of my life when I figured out what I wanted to do, and I just had to share my experience.

J. W. Tanner
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Lorenzo De Iaco
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  • PS the book talks a lot about theoretical physics, which is of course the main field where maths get applied, and does a great job of showing how powerful the abstract tools the book talks about can be used to find things out about the real world – Lorenzo De Iaco Sep 26 '23 at 12:39
  • sorry...I don't know how to reply to a user that has spaces in the name...anyway, "@lorenzo de laco" that sounds very good and also the link to theoretical physics is perfect since she likes that too. I'll keep that book on my list for in a few years. thank you. – Max Mustemal Sep 27 '23 at 06:06