Reading list

Long reads, bound.

Math, science, and voices that reward slow pages — the shelf we steal from between essays.

Mathematics

Proofs, patterns, and the unreasonable effectiveness of numbers.

The ABCs of Triangle, Square, Circle
Ellen Lupton & J. Abbott Miller
Sixty-nine pages on the shapes that rewired twentieth-century design. The sharpest Bauhaus primer ever written.
Naive Set Theory
Paul R. Halmos
104 pages. The foundational language of mathematics built from the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms. Precise, wry, not a wasted word.
How Round Is Your Circle?
John Bryant & Chris Sangwin
Where engineering meets mathematics. A century of mechanisms designed to answer: how do you know if something is actually round?
Infinite Powers
Steven Strogatz
Newton didn't invent calculus. Archimedes was doing it in the third century BC. Strogatz proves this — and then shows how the infinity principle shaped everything from Neptune's discovery to gravitational waves.
Islamic Geometric Patterns
Eric Broug
A compass, a ruler, and 1,400 years of quiet geometry. 23 patterns from real buildings — from Córdoba to Samarkand.
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
Written in Brixton Prison in 1918. What is the number 3? Russell takes six months and 208 pages to answer it with precision.
The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid
Oliver Byrne
Red, yellow, blue, black. Euclid in colour. Before Mondrian, before the Bauhaus.
Pasta by Design
George L. Legendre
92 pasta shapes. 3 parametric equations each. 2 trig functions. No recipes at all.
The Geometry of Pasta
Caz Hildebrand & Jacob Kenedy
Shape is not aesthetic — shape is the mathematics of flavour.
The Fractal Geometry of Nature
Benoît B. Mandelbrot
A new geometry for a world that was never smooth. Clouds, coastlines, veins — all described at last.

Physics

From quantum foam to the arrow of time.

Education & Others

Learning, wonder, and the books that don't fit neatly anywhere else.