So, err, when are we gonna get medical MDMA and medical LCD?

Perspectives. Facebook, for example, turned out to be a great success, financially speaking. But I find it severely uninteresting as a product.

> Once outside you realise you were wasting your life on trivia of the most meaningless kind.

I think it depends. From the outside, industry looks to be churning out nothing, but trivial stuff for sale.

"From the outside, industry looks to be churning out nothing, but trivial stuff for sale."

I suppose what one chooses to focus on. The stuff I do in industry helps people design houses and infrastructure.

Concrete mixing companies help people build houses and infrastructure, if you want to put it that way. Still, it's the epitome of churning out trivial stuff.

I think this list could use some updating. Most books on the list are super old. Also, from cursory look, there appears to be only one book on discrete math in Intermediate. There are tons of discrete math books that should serve as stepping stones for the one listed. For example, Discrete Intro to Math by Edward Scheinerman and Discrete Math by Susanna Epp.

Old books aren't bad, in fact, it's rare that new books are much better than the very best of the old books.

The Reddit discussion linked in another comment yields an updated Github repository, but a cursory glance didn't come up with any big changes.

Re: your Discrete Math complaint; if the author (and his friends, there were very few reviewers involved) didn't specialize in Discrete Math, then it's not surprising that somethign is missing. In fact the author actually explicitly says that the list is incomplete and which his specialties were.

I am not really complaining about Discrete Math. The book listed in Intermediate is fairly/horrendously difficult for someone who hasn't seen elementary treatment of the subject before.

Also, there are newer books of comparable quality to old classics like Algebra by Birkhoff/Maclane. If nothing, they have updated prose. Chapter 0 by Aluffi is phenomenal, for example.

List was last updated in 1999 so missing good books like Sussman's Functional Differential Geometry where you convert formulas into programs.

Of the fields I know well, this book is pretty good. It would certainly not hurt to add new topics (high but finite dimensional vector spaces, computational harmonic analysis, statistics), but for the specific topics covered this list is excellent.

It's actually on Github[1] now, updates would probably be welcomed.

[1]: https://github.com/ystael/chicago-ug-math-bib

Being able to use something and knowing the whys are two different things. Many people know Calculus(practice), but not many know Real Analysis(theory behind Calculus, the academical bit).

"In mathematics, the quaternions are a number system that extends the complex numbers."

Naturals are a subset of integers. Integers are a subset of rationals. Rational are a subset of reals. Reals are a subset of complex numbers. The latter are a subset of quaternions. It's not difficult to construct each number system. If you look inside any undergrad math textbook, you'll find exact same writing style showcased in the Wikipedia article on quaternions.