Because there's no Kindle version of "Proofs from the Book", I didn't order it. But I did see in the recommended list a book called, "How to Solve It"....which is apparently a popular general purpose problem solving book that, according to a reviewer, was given to Microsoft's new programmers. Less than $10 on Kindle so hopefully this will scratch the proof-solving itch for me:
There was a Kindle edition for the 3rd edition of the book, but it was justifiably withdrawn. Here was my review on Amazon to warn people against buying it:
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The Kindle edition is completely worthless, because it is missing many symbols. It appears to have been done using OCR, and it was confused by mathematical symbols. For example, there are some places where I THINK it was supposed to be the greek letter phi, but it comes out as a left parenthesis and a right parenthesis. At least with that you can figure out what it was supposed to be. There is much worse--places where symbols are completely gone. E.g., there is a place where you just get a capital sigma with a subscript giving a summation limit, a blank space, a less than sign, and another blank space. So, the proof is saying the some of something is less than something else.
This is a shame, because the book itself, from what I can see, is EXCELLENT.
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This illustrates a major annoyance with Amazon's review system. They combine reviews for all formats of a book. This is bad both from the review side and the potential purchaser side.
From the review side, how many stars should I have given the book? The non-Kindle versions are excellent. 5 stars. The Kindle edition, as I said, was completely worthless. 1 star. So do I give 5 stars or 1 star? 3 stars?
From the purchaser side, the combined reviews are annoying because I want to see the reviews specifically for the format I'm considering. For "Proofs from the Book" this is not too much of a problem because there are only 17 reviews. I can just read them all. For books with hundreds of reviews, it is a problem.
As far as math books on Kindle go, PftB is the worst I've tried, but I've not actually found any math book that was acceptable to me. The others I've seen have had all the symbols there, but it was done by having the math handled as embedded images, which did not resize if I changed the font size, and were smaller than the math in the paper book.
Making a mathematical book in mobi/epub is a difficult problem but I'm surprised the publishers weren't aware of the difficulties.
Simple statements can be expressed in pure Unicode (though the Kindle fonts have incomplete Unicode support for the relevant blocks). Anything more than that has to be an image, which is the bane of digital publishing, since it won't scale with the base font size. epub 3 might be able to cope with it but apart from iBooks I don't know anyone else using it.
I ordered the hardcover Proofs a few weeks ago after seeing the Calkin-Wilf tree [1] [2]. I cannot suggest it on the Kindle because you're going to want to write in it—there are even large margins to encourage this kind of behavior.
It's one of the best books I've ever bought measured in raw joy and satisfaction per page. Like all proofs, reading is a very involved process, but these are genuinely stunning ones.
This is part of a series. I haven't read Solve It but there is another one that I worked through several years ago before returning to school, How to Prove It, that really cleared up how to do proofs for me. It is all based around set theory and some of the later proofs are quite deep:
Not part of a series. "How to solve it" was written long before "How to prove it", and the latter was presumably named in homage to Polya's book. (Though I don't think it has much in common.)
There's another recent mathsy book called "How to solve it: modern heuristics" which is actually about optimization algorithms and has basically nothing to do with Polya's book.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-It-Mathematical-Princeton/dp...