Ask HN: Do you read math & hard science books? How?

If they don't take a good bit of time to read, then you're not doing it right. These are books full of tools for the mind. The best way to read them is a little at a time, taking the parts that click in your mind and trying them out on problems that seemed insurmountable before. The first time you open a big box of strange tools, it won't be immediately apparent to you what they are all for.

Finding a good math book is like stumbling into that room full of all of the weapons on your first time through Doom...

Perhaps you just like the idea of reading all these books rather than the actual reading of them.

Basically, this is just a classic inventory control problem. If the inventory is piling up, you need to either decrease the rate of acquisition, increase the rate of consumption, or (preferably) both.

I can't say how typical the situation is, but it's definitely not just you. I have quite the stack of books on my "to read" list, but I keep working my way through them (and adding more to the pile.) So it goes.

I often buy books and read some chapters that interest me. I get most out of such books months or even years later when I can appreciate their content better. It's good to know that I've the stuff at my hand, often there are explanations, algorithms, concepts in a depth one rarely finds on the net.

I tend to collect lots of books, usually at times when I'm not really reading much. However, I eventually (usually a matter of weeks or sometimes months) get back to reading and will crunch through endless amounts of books. I've managed to get through 500 page books in a day, every day for over two weeks before.

As for specifically science books, I tend to read them slower so I usually read a chapter or section of one and then read a chapter of a fiction novel. If I keep switching I find I can get through both quite quickly as reading the fiction novel will usually give enough motivation to read the non-fiction hard science book quickly too.

Definitely best to sift through them slowly, get the most out of them. No use hammering through a good book then taking nothing from it at the end.

In my student days, before I became a working programmer, I was desperately poor and couldn't afford all the books I wanted to buy. So I got into the habit of buying books when I had money in my account to avoid a future in which I have to look longingly at a book and not have money to buy it. So, yes your "buying a book and reading a few years later" situation is something i am familiar with.

So anyways, I ended up having a few hundred technical books (and a couple of thousand non technical books). The future of not having money to buy books never came (yet, touch wood) and the biggest advantage of having this huge collection of books is I can cross reference them to get better info on what I am looking for. On the other hand, moving is a huge pain :-)

EDIT:(example of buying a book and then using it years later) I am now (slowly) working through Cormen et al's "Introdcution to Algorithms" (second edition) book. The idea is to do all the exercises and proofs and so on. Should be done by the end of the year I think.I bought this book a few years ago and am using it(seriously) only now. (There's a third edition out now for anyone planning to buy. second ed is good enough for my purposes)

My parents are in academia & they've each amassed a huge collection of books. I learned very early on that I should be collecting digital books instead.

I bought a Kindle b/c I don't have room for all my books. I recently had a child and his books already fill one of my bookshelves. So I've been cleaning out my physical books, only keeping those I really like. The Kindle DX might be the way to go for texts. So you get unlimited space (Amazon will keep your books online), access to all the classics for free (via gutenberg,etc) and your books are always with you (while you carry the device anyway).

Of all the things you can spend your money on, books are the best investment by far.

I have the same problem. I have TONS of Mathematics (mainly) and Physics books, but I've not really worked through most of them. I've spent a fortune on them so far. I always keep saying that I'll take a couple of years off to concentrate on nothing but hard science, but I know that will never happen.

I actually have a theory that good programmers are frustrated Mathematicians and Physicists who couldn't stomach the real thing and chose the easier way out.

The problem with math books. Succinctness. There you have it. This is the single most annoying problem with succinctness. When you go over a line of text sometimes it is justified to spend 3 hours with it. But sometimes its not, its just something that you are not seeing. The thing with math books is you cant tell if it needs 3 hours or 2 minutes because all the lines look the same and the succinct ones kinda jump at you without warning. Succinctness is Power, but if you are facing a powerful person in combat you wont be singing the glories of origins of your foes power.

The way I go about these books is to work the theorems myself. It will take a loooong time to get through the first few chapters because that is where you are getting oriented towards that kind of thinking. The second chapter is usually the hardest! Stick with it. Do not try to calculate how long it is going to take to complete this book at this rate. Because the thing gets faster as you read it. Some kinda exponential function at work, the more you read the faster you can read since you have an intuition for the succinct parts and you can sense them from far. Many times you don't have to complete the book since the later chapters are on a need to know basis and the fundamentals are covered in the first half of the book. Also the thing gets faster once you cross the second chapter since you know the language now.

Why you should work the theorems yourself: When you read them you feel like you know them, but this is a bias. ( I use that word as an umbrella term to refer to all unintentional consequences of the way our mind works ). Once you try to reconstruct the theorem, that is when you get to understand all the gaps, holes and whole craters in your knowledge with such clarity.

Clearly knowing what you don't know is the last but one step before you know it. This is like finding the exact line in which the bug occurs, 95% of the times when I have done this the fix is immediately obvious to me. The remaining 5% of the times the bug is a consequence of the architecture (fondly referred to as a feature). To think of a parallel to this in learning: these are the times when you feel an Ah ha moment where whole areas of darkness come to light.

You need a guru by all means to guide you. Not all the information about the difficulty of a topic is captured by a book. You wont understand the consequences of a particular way of thinking unless you have spent a few years doing it wrong. So find a person who has been down that path to guide you. Also a buddy group makes the whole experience much more manageable and fun.

I would try to take them cover-to-cover and then use them as reference. Also, perhaps, if you really wanted to learn the material, you would simply check them out of the library. There's been an article posted on the frontpage recently about how verbalizing a goal makes it less likely to be actualized: I think a parallel occurs with buying books (I experience the same phenomenon).

Get'em from the library, yo.

I was a theoretical physicist for 13 years, and struggled a lot with this question. I found it very useful to develop several different styles for reading mathematics and physics. Mostly I did this in the context of reading papers, not books, but the comments below are easily adapted to books.

One unusual but very useful style was to set a goal like reading 15 papers in 3 hours. I use the term "reading" here in an unusual way. Of course, I don't mean understanding everything in the papers. Instead, I'd do something like this: for each paper, I had 12 minutes to read it. The goal was to produce a 3-point written LaTeX summary of the most important material I could extract: usually questions, open problems, results, new techniques, or connections I hadn't seen previously. When time was up, it was onto the next paper. A week later, I'd make a revision pass over the material, typically it would take an hour or so.

I found this a great way of rapidly getting an overview of a field, understanding what was important, what was not, what the interesting questions were, and so on. In particular, it really helped identify the most important papers, for a deeper read.

For deeper reads of important papers or sections of books I would take days, weeks or months. Giving lectures about the material and writing LaTeX lecture notes helped a lot.

Other ideas I found useful:

- Often, when struggling with a book or paper, it's not you that's the problem, it's the author. Finding another source can quickly clear stuff up.

- The more you make this a social activity, the better off you'll be. I organize lecture courses, write notes, blog the notes, and so on. E.g. http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=252 (on Yang-Mills theories) and http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?page_id=503 (links to some of my notes on distributed computing).

- On being stuck: if you feel like you're learning things, keep doing whatever you're doing, but if you feel stuck, try another approach. Early on, I'd sometimes get stuck on a book or a paper for a week. It was only later that I realized that I mostly got stuck when either (a) it was an insubstantive point; or (b) the book was badly written; or (c) I was reading something written at the wrong level for me. In any case, remaining stuck was rarely the right thing to do.

- Have a go at proving theorems / solving problems yourself, before reading the solution. You'll learn a lot more.

- Most material isn't worth spending a lot of time on. It's better to spend an hour each seriously reviewing 10 quantum texts, and finding one that's good, and will repay hundreds of hours of study, than it is to spend 10 hours ploughing through the first quantum text that looks okay when you browse through it in the library. Understanding mathematics deeply takes a lot of time. That means effort spent in identifying high quality material is often repaid far more than with (say) a novel or lighter non-fiction.

Textbooks are indispensable for really getting the material down, but I've found it much easier to read lectures.

Feynman has great examples of this type of work: "The Character of Physical Law" or "The Feynman Lectures on Computation" are both excellent. I've found that these books walk somewhere between textbook and popular science book. Easy to read but all the while teaching you the material.

I've found this type of work to be the crucial link between pop. science and a textbook. You learn enough that you can find your footing when you're in a textbook and and also the inspiration to actually read it.

Yeah, I have a wide variety of very interesting books collecting dust on my shelves. I don't know why really, I think maybe I spent my time in graduate school immersed in theory and these last few years I have been completely focused on understanding how that theory relates to practice. Maybe the pendulum will swing the other way again once I have more free time.

Thanks HN, Many times a rhetorical question is answered in ways more than i can ask for. I have few attributes that I suspect are behind my depression. This being one of them. I have been doing the same- but unlike the OP and others, I get depressed that I bought a book and by not reading it completely, I didn't give its due. I take it very personally that I have Cormen's Algorithms and not gone past chapter1. It's like insulting the writers- i don't know if you get it. It's like you want to be the most passionate religious man on earth and the holy bible you really wanted to read and you know that is what you want is lying on the shelf, while you are trying to sort floating divs on a web page...and whenever i pick up a book, i will hit a block where it gets difficult to understand and because i am used to reading other books in a more casual way, i come to tell myself how dumb i am. i convince myself this to be true when i read about everyone i follow and all the books they have read...it's a vicious cycle that's been eating me inside out - in almost a literal sense.

...But many a times, I will just grab a book (anything - even non technical) and read it while sitting on the throne - read a few lines and ponder over it. my favorite is sicp - which i have not completed after having it well over a year. The few minutes of pondering is much more valuable compared to the regular day, when I am less patient and I want to do some "quick fix" things. I am so glad to find that I am not alone to read parts in between.

so @zkz, thank you for posting this question. The answers posted removed one more attribute which added to my depression. many more to overcome. what a day! I feel so relieved! - i would say this if I met you, so posted it here.

I used to buy math and science books all the time. I probably read 25% of the books I bought. I quit buying books in general after I moved. Moving 500 books sucks.

Now I only buy math and science books if I actually plan to work through them. I usually try to do the problems first and only go back to the writing if I can't figure the problems out. Other books for leisure reading, I just get them at the library.

It takes me a while to read the books I have as well. I've bought lots of books than I haven't been able to read yet and my list of books to buy and read keeps growing as well. Another thing that adds to the amount of time it takes me to read a book is that I'm a very meticulous reader. I like looking up and cross referencing anything I don't understand, so for me that means looking up lots of stuff. I wonder if other people do this as well.

I read all the main theorems without even reading any of the definitions and examples for the first pass while at the same time I write down any questions I have with a reference to the theorem it pertains. For my second pass I go back and look at the examples to see if they answer any of the questions I wrote down and write down more questions referencing the examples. For the first two passes I don't try to answer any questions. I simply try to engage the material. Finally I try to answer all the unanswered questions and work some of the exercises and write down more questions if there are any left.