For the last several years, I’ve been celebrating International Women’s Day by posting lists of mathematics books written or coauthored by women: 2020, 2021, 2022. Here’s another set. The links go to Wikipedia articles on the books, where you can find more information about them collated from their published reviews. The level and selection is, as usual, random, based mainly on whether the book’s topic caught my interest and it had enough published reviews to justify a Wikipedia article.

  • The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge (2007), Kirsti Andersen. The development of the mathematics of perspective and descriptive geometry, and its applications by European artists, from the 15th to 18th centuries.

  • Extrinsic Geometric Flows (2020), Ben Andrews, Bennett Chow, Christine Guenther, and Mat Langford. A geometric flow is a way of continuously moving a curve, surface, or other shape, with the speed and direction of motion depending on its shape. It is “extrinsic” when the flow depends on a higher-dimensional space in which the moving object is embedded, rather than just on the intrinsic geometry of the object itself. This is a graduate textbook on the subject.

  • Spatial Mathematics: Theory and Practice through Mapping (2013), Sandra Arlinghaus and Joseph Kerski. The mathematical background behind geodesy and spatial visualization in geographic information systems.

  • Problem Solving Through Recreational Mathematics (1980), Bonnie Averbach and Orin Chein. Despite the title this is an undergraduate textbook, for general education courses aimed at non-mathematics students. Its premise is that the use of fun “recreational” problems can help motivate these students to learn mathematical problem-solving techniques.

  • Geometric and Topological Inference (2018), Jean-Daniel Boissonnat, Frédéric Chazal, and Mariette Yvinec. Computational geometry meets machine learning.

  • Independence Theory in Combinatorics: An Introductory Account with Applications to Graphs and Transversals (1980), Victor Bryant and Hazel Perfect. An undergraduate text on matroid theory, with a particular focus on graph-theoretic applications of matroids.

  • Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics (2017), Eugenia Cheng. A general-audience book looking at the many ways mathematics has approached the infinite.

  • The Symmetries of Things (2008), John Horton Conway, Heidi Burgiel, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss. A bit annoying for its frequent use of neologism and revisionist history, but packed with detail about discrete symmetries of geometric objects.

  • A Biography of Maria Gaetana Agnesi (2008), Antonella Cupillari. This mainly consists of a translation of Antonio Francesco Frisi’s Italian-language biography of Agnesi, augmented with many pages of notes and with translations of some of Agnesi’s mathematical works.

  • Finding Ellipses: What Blaschke Products, Poncelet’s Theorem, and the Numerical Range Know about Each Other (2019), Ulrich Daepp, Pamela Gorkin, Andrew Shaffer, and Karl Voss. An undergraduate-level exposition of some deep connections between functional analysis (analytic functions with specified zeros), geometry (polygons simultaneously inscribed in and circumscribing conics), and linear algebra (convex sets containing the eigenvalues of a matrix).

  • Introduction to Lattices and Order (1990, 2002), Brian A. Davey and Hilary Priestley. A graduate textbook on order theory, also noteworthy for its tips on how to use LaTeX to make order-theoretic mathematical diagrams.

  • The Geometry of the Octonions (2015), Tevian Dray and Corinne Manogue. Beyond the real numbers, complex numbers, and quaternions, the next step is the octonions, a division algebra but not a ring. This book surveys this topic at an advanced undergraduate level.

  • The Cube Made Interesting (1960, 1964), Aniela Ehrenfeucht. Aimed at high school students, and originally written in Polish, on the rotational symmetries of a cube, its colorings, and on the ability to pass a cube through a hole in an equal-sized cube (“Prince Rupert’s cube”), illustrated with red-blue anaglyphic 3d visualizations.

  • The Erdős Distance Problem (2011), Julia Garibaldi, Alex Iosevich, and Steven Senger, an advanced undergraduate monograph on the problem of arranging points to make as few distinct distances as possible, unfortunately made mostly obsolete soon after its publication by the polynomial method of Larry Guth and Nets Katz.

  • Lumen Naturae: Visions of the Abstract in Art and Mathematics (2020), Matilde Marcolli. On inspirations and analogies connecting modern art, mathematics, and mathematical physics.

  • Black Mathematicians and Their Works (1980), Virginia Newell, Joella Gipson, L. Waldo Rich, and Beauregard Stubblefield. Brief biographies of 62 black mathematicians, and reprints of 26 of their papers on mathematics and mathematics education, maybe the only book of its kind.

  • From Zero to Infinity: What Makes Numbers Interesting (1955, …, 2006), Constance Reid. A classic of general-audience mathematics exposition, on different kinds of numbers and topics in number theory.

  • Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom (2013), Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez. A collection of case studies on mathematical fallacies occurring in famous court cases, aimed at a general audience.

  • Curvature of Space and Time, with an Introduction to Geometric Analysis (2020), Iva Stavrov. An undergraduate textbook on differential geometry and its applications in the theory of relativity.

  • The History of Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (2012), Jackie Stedall. This is less an overview of the history of mathematics itself (maybe too big a topic for a short book) and more an overview of the philosophy of the history of mathematics, as demonstrated through several case studies.

  • Ad Quadratum: The Practical Application of Geometry in Medieval Architecture (2002), Nancy Y. Wu. An edited volume of papers on geometry in medieval architecture, mostly of Gothic cathedrals.

  • Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and their Chalkboards (2021), Jessica Wynne. A photo-essay pairing photographs of mathematician’s chalkboards with reflections on their contents by the mathematicians. I listed this in last year’s collection of books for which I could not find enough reviews, but in this case I subsequently did find them.

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