hee, yeah, I know both the engineer non-geeks and the engineer-math-geeks. Yes. I understand completely -- as we've sort of talked about before, this is the thing that totally annoys me about pop science.
The only pop-math books I can think of off-hand that are actually awesome in this regard are Journey Through Genius, which I read, oh, more than twenty years ago now, but it obviously made a huge impression on me, and Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire, both of which try to explain the math behind them.
I'm not sure I've read any pop physics that does the same thing. (Haven't read Chad Orzel's books; they might?) I do know a wonderful PDF free set of notes on quantum information theory, but that might be too technical?
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The only pop-math books I can think of off-hand that are actually awesome in this regard are Journey Through Genius, which I read, oh, more than twenty years ago now, but it obviously made a huge impression on me, and Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire, both of which try to explain the math behind them.
I'm not sure I've read any pop physics that does the same thing. (Haven't read Chad Orzel's books; they might?) I do know a wonderful PDF free set of notes on quantum information theory, but that might be too technical?