Mathematicians don’t read math books

David Bessis is a French mathematician and the author of Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity.

He said on the EconTalk podcast that it’s common knowledge among mathematicians that math books aren’t meant to be read.

They’re not books in the same way as a novel is. A novel is actually telling you a story using words that you can understand. So, you open up the book on page one; you read it; it makes sense.

Math books are written in a certain way that follows a certain logic that is called logical formalism. It’s a kind of recipe for building mathematical objects, but the words make no sense to you when you open them, so you can’t read them.

… It’s very like the telephone book–you can’t really read the telephone book.