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calstad

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These fall more in the "pop-sci" realm, but I think are really good at trying to convey what kinds of things working mathematicians actually think about:

- Colossal Book of Mathematics by Martin Gardner: Uses games and recreational math to introduce areas like group theory and topology.

- Finding Moonshine by Marcus Du Sautoy: Tells the story of the unexpected connection between two areas of math that, on the surface, seem to be completely unrelated.

- The Great Mathematical Problems by Ian Stewart: Does a good job explaining several of the major open problems in math today.

Mine is Day of the Tentacle, which then turned me on to the whole Lucas Arts catalog and other point & click adventures like Myst. I credit these games for making me a better problem solver/mathematician/programmer because they got me used to being stuck for quite long bits of time and there was no one you could really go ask for hints.

She was also very instrumental in the discovery of the functorality of homology in algebraic topology, which led to the explosion of homological algebra. She was definitely a great polymath