Reddit reviews When Least Is Best: How Mathematicians Discovered Many Clever Ways to Make Things as Small (or as Large) as Possible
We found 2 Reddit comments about When Least Is Best: How Mathematicians Discovered Many Clever Ways to Make Things as Small (or as Large) as Possible. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
Wow man good stuff. Honestly before you get into technical stuff I'd recommend When least is best. I read it my sophomore year before I took my uni's calculus 1 and honestly it might be one of the reasons I even continued to learn it. You're going to get overwhelmed with textbook recommendations. Some are good some are bad, but most of them miss the point of trying to learn why we're interested in this stuff in the first place. This book is pretty good at addressing that.
Here's a random book on amazon that I was given when I was in middle school or early high school. I read it once about every several years. It definitely goes through some tricky derivations that may be beyond you, but most of the toughest stuff is kept to the appendices.
The approach: looking at minimization problems and their solutions throughout history. The writing is of a very high caliber.