"buffalo"

My Hands Are Bananas.

Godel,Escher,Bach

you do not need to stand on one foot.

online resources for this subject seem completely inadequate. if anyone has any advice to offer, please link me.

wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

Gödel, Escher, Bach describes, in Pulitzer prize winning simplicity, some basic tenets of number theory, geometry, logic, etc. Anyway, Dawson’s the only person I’ve ever known to take a class as ridiculous as “number theory.” Seriously, they’re just numbers. Why do you need theories about them? So, the book pretty much rocks. It’s like crack for the part of your brain that loves math and logic. I’m not sure how it would seem to someone who already knows Euclid’s proof that there exist infinite prime numbers (amazing) or on the other hand, people who couldn’t give less of a shit how many prime numbers there are… Anyway, I have to extend my thanks to Matt who suggested this book to me. It’s an amazing book for people who love math and logic but weren’t able to follow up on either (neither?) in college. Not only does the book entertain me endlessly, but also it has helped me gain an ‘in’ with the CS people at work, who have been helping me understand some of the things that go unsaid in the book.
On that point, it’s important to note that this book is old as hell and un-edited. It could really use an extra sentence here or there to set some of the ‘unspoken’ conditionals, e.g. “if x represents a string of hyphens, x cannot be a string of 0 hyphens.” This is an extremely important assumption left unsaid in the early part of the book. Anyway, the CS people at work have been clearing all this up for me.
Anyway, this book rocks so far, and I don’t think it’s going to stop being stimulating and fun as I go through. It also proves to me that I should memorize Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I should have known this before.
It should also be noted that the “Bach” aspects of the book are clearly from a mathematician’s point of view. They sometimes seem superficial if you have studied a lot of music.
Anyway, this book is great so far. Pick it up.