My Favorite Textbook: STEM Books that Inspire

[ergospherical]

What's your (single) favourite textbook, and why? Not limited to Physics, but keep it STEM.

Maybe some relevant criteria:
- nostalgia factor
- scientific accuracy
- writing style
- level of insight / new perspective?
etc.

 

[fresh_42]

I like Introduction to Lie Algebras and Representation Theory best. It matches all your criteria: old, accurate, easy to read, a good starting point for research in this area. And most of all: you can use it to look up things without having to read entire chapters first!

However, my heart beats for Jean Dieudonné, Geschichte der Mathematik 1700-1900, Vieweg Verlag 1985. Not really a textbook, but a good source to understand how mathematics evolved. And it has many short biographies of famous mathematicians.

 

[Bystander]

Lewis and Randall, as revised by Pitzer and Brewer.

 

[DaveE]

Goodman - Fourier Optics. I don't know why, I guess I liked the subject and it wasn't way too hard to understand. I actually never used it much in my career.

The older edition I had was, apparently, written in 1750, according to Amazon. 18 years before Fourier was born, so maybe we should be calling it the Goodman Transform?

 

[PeroK]

The only book I have from my undergraduate days is Elementary Analysis: The Theory of Calculus, by Kenneth Ross. The rest I sold on to the next year's students.

To be honest, I don't have the patience for the excessive rigour these days, but at the time it captured my imagination.

Of the recent books I like Special Relativity by Helliwell. It's the book that got me started learning physics when I retired over seven years ago.

 

[mpresic3]

Goldstein, Classical Mechanics.
Shankar, Quantum Mechanics, though I started off not liking it until I examined some fine points that fill in gaps left behind in other textbooks in QM.

Intro to General Relativity, Adler, Bazin, Schiffers. (Old treatment but they motivate the mathematics that is just thrown out there for the student in the modern treatments)

In general, I find I like older textbooks because they tend to motivate ideas before presenting them as the more modern treatments do.

 

[collinsmark]

An old book that's dear to me is "The Art of Electronics" by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill.

(Although the image is for the 3rd edition, I have only have and have read the 2nd).

The book is targeted not only to electrical engineering students, but also electronic hobbyists. It had a big impact on me. I'll explain.

"The Art of Electronics," or simply, "Horowitz and Hill," as we used to call it, was never a required textbook for any electrical engineering class I took at university, although it was a "recommended" book for many classes.

Whenever a new, practical, electrical circuit came up (such as one with a transistor or two) for analysis in any of our classes, the students fell into one of two groups: those that looked at the circuit with their eyes glazed over, dreading the tedium of putting it into a SPICE model or the anxiety over the thought of painstakingly analyzing it by hand with equations and algebra just to figure out what the circuit's purpose was; and those of us who almost instantly, at a glance, knew what the circuit did and how it did it, just by looking at it. The second group was comprised of the students who had invested in, and read at least a little of Horowitz and Hill. The book is that good.

 

[George Jones]

It is impossible for me to identify a single favourite book. A book for me that has a large nostalgia factor, and that I still like, is Mathematical Physics by Robert Geroch. This book, in the free vector space (with suitable inner product) on the set of books, is in the orthogonal complement of the space of books with similar titles. It starts with a brief introduction to category theory!

 

[robphy]

It is impossible for me to identify a single favourite book. A book for me that has a large nostalgia factor, and that I still like, is Mathematical Physics by Robert Geroch. This book, in the free vector space (with suitable inner product) on the set of books, is in the orthogonal complement of the space of books with similar titles. It starts with a brief introduction to category theory!

It was surprising and disappointing that there wasn't any differential geometry in it.
Relatively recently, some of Geroch's lecture notes that were $\LaTeX$-ed are now available
http://www.minkowskiinstitute.org/mip/books/ln.html

 

[nuuskur]

Several that I like a lot. If I had to pick. Tristan Needham's Complex analysis.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Although the image is for the 3rd edition

How could it possibly be improved?

As I told a EE who worked for me once: "I don't understand transistors. I understand Transistor Man"

 

[Mondayman]

It's a bit hard to pick a favorite. The only textbook I've worked through 75% or more is Physics by Serway.

Elementary Linear Algebra by Anton introduces the subject well. Quickly became one of my favorite courses.

I am enjoying A Treatise on Integral Calculus, Vol. 1 and 2. About 2000 pages of how to solve different integrals and lots of fun exercises.