Precalculus Mathematics in a Nutshell
#1591 of 2,654 all-time
Precalculus Mathematics in a Nutshell
George Finlay Simmons
4 people recommended it in 4 threads, 2021–2023.
What people on Hacker News said
It’s a tiny book but powerful. It helped me a prepare for college. There’s something very inspiring about understanding geometry, trig, and algebra well enough that you can flip through a few pages, follow along, and basically cover the whole of those subjects as taught in high schools.
I later used it to study for the GMAT and GRE and got a 99 percentile math score both times. I’m reasonably intelligent but not a math whiz. The book definitely helped. It is brief but densely-packed with everything you really need to know.
It teaches the concepts and cuts out all of the crap, but the diagrams and the clearly stated formulas make a lot of the implicit knowledge, explicit and extremely elucidating.
"Precalculus Mathematics in a Nutshell" and "Calculus Made Easy" were complete lifesavers.
Where it comes up
- Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read? 2023 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math? 2023 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: The book that did it for you in math and/or CS? 2022 · 1 recommendation
- The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius 2021 · 1 recommendation