29  References

This site is not yet accumulating a full bibliography — references.bib holds a single placeholder entry, removed once real inline citations (@key) are added chapter by chapter as claims that need them arise. This page instead states the sourcing policy those future citations will follow, and lists a handful of general books worth having nearby regardless of what this site covers.

29.1 Sourcing policy

Claims about mathematical history, the origin of a term, or a formal definition are sourced, in order of preference:

  1. MacTutor History of Mathematics (University of St Andrews) for biographical and historical claims — dates, priority, who formalized what and when.
  2. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for foundational and philosophical topics — the axiomatic method, the philosophy of mathematics, logic.
  3. Primary sources (the original paper or book introducing a concept) where genuinely load-bearing and accessible.
  4. Established textbooks — Wikipedia is used, if at all, as a pointer toward better sources, never as the citation itself.

Where a historical claim is simplified or genuinely contested among historians, the text says so explicitly rather than presenting a tidy narrative as settled fact — see, for instance, the repeated flags throughout Number Systems and Axioms and Definitions.

29.2 General reading

A short list of books this site’s early chapters draw conceptual framing from, useful for anyone who wants to go past what’s here:

  • Paul Halmos, Naive Set Theory — still the clearest short introduction to set theory at the level Sets assumes.
  • Michael Artin, Algebra — the standard reference for groups, rings, and fields, well past Groups’s scope.
  • Sheldon Axler, Linear Algebra Done Right — builds linear algebra with almost no reliance on determinants, closer in spirit to Vector Spaces and Linear Algebra than a typical computational course.
  • Timothy Gowers (ed.), The Princeton Companion to Mathematics — the single best one-volume map of mathematics as a whole, in the sense the map is reaching for at much smaller scale.