“How do you write a Math History book?” Step 1: Read lots of math history books

About a third of these are from the library, and I am off to return them now. I didn’t read these all cover-to-cover. But when you write a book like this, you need tons or resources around you to reference when needed.

I used a few more than this, but this is most of them. ChatGPT claims there are 144

Currently reading this! An absolute gem! What’s your favourite math history book? 👀

@MarcusduSautoy Ordered! Thanks for the rec! Favorite... not sure, it's tough. Many are very different types of books than others which makes them hard to compare. I do love William Durham as a writer, so maybe one of his books.

May be Jay sir mood during reading the books.

I actually would be interested in your workflow for how you read/capture notes/synthesize ideas. Do you do chronologically? skip between books? thoroughly read one book at a time? I haven't found a workflow that feels right for me yet.

I should make a YouTube video on that. It's complicated. Briefly: I started with a book that surveyed things pretty generally. Then did a relatively deep dive on some specific topics, then did culture-by-culture deep dives to see what I missed, and read bio books throughout.

that’s crazily impressive.

Victor Katz book can be a difficult read, especially if you were to work on the problems :)

Just ordered this. Excited to give it a read!