This one is pretty lovely. It will not make you into a mathematician, but it does a fine job of introducing quite a few areas of maths and not using a thousand pages to do it. Although there are some formulas and proofs, this book is decidedly on the “building up an intuition” side of things. The illustrations help a lot with that, especially in the chapters on topology.

Other chapters discuss sets, functions, abstract algebra, linear algebra, real analysis, probability theory, and even computers. The book is more than 20 years old though, so it’s not as cutting edge as it used to be.

Light reading about excitingly complex topics. Would recommend.^[1] The only thing I would wish for is more examples of the real life applications.

★★★★☆

(339 pages, ISBN:9780486284248, Worldcat, Open Library)