Can You Recommend a Book to Better Understand Abstract Math Concepts?

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In summary, the conversation revolves around the speaker's difficulty in understanding abstract concepts in their engineering course's pure math classes. They are looking for a book that explains these concepts in a more comprehensive manner, with some recommendations being 'A Most Elegant Equation' and books by authors such as Serge Lang and I.M. Gelfand. The ultimate goal is to gain a better understanding of fundamental logic for more complex topics in algebra.
  • #1
Thorium90
So I recently join an engineering course, in my pure math classes we are currently studying basic algebra, simultaneous equations or quadratics. I quickly found all this very abstract and presented as facts.

Now, I don't know how to phrase this, rather than looking for a book that just states what laws of indices are, and so on. I am looking for a book that would explain these more as maybe a full concepts and its cleverness if you will.

I have heard that some people like a book called 'A most elegant equation' but I don't even know how relevant it would be. What would you recommend?
 
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  • #2
Thorium90 said:
So I recently join an engineering course, in my pure math classes we are currently studying basic algebra, simultaneous equations or quadratics. I quickly found all this very abstract and presented as facts.

Now, I don't know how to phrase this, rather than looking for a book that just states what laws of indices are, and so on. I am looking for a book that would explain these more as maybe a full concepts and its cleverness if you will.

I have heard that some people like a book called 'A most elegant equation' but I don't even know how relevant it would be. What would you recommend?

You didn't mention on what topic should the book be ?
 
  • #3
Buffu said:
You didn't mention on what topic should the book be ?

Ow yeah my bad if I wasn't clear, a book looking into the field of algebra with emphasis on fundamental logic so I can get a better understanding once I start moving to the more complex things like Boolean algebra or calculus.
 
  • #4
For pre-calculus algebra try Basic Mathematics by Serge Lang, Algebra and Trigonometry by I.M. Gelfand.
 

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