My Library

Although I read 90% of my books digitally, I own a sizeable collection of monographs. Unfortunately I scatter most of them around the house, leaving old texts to lie on the ground. I’ve been procrastinating on organizing my bookshelf, but here’s a few shelves of what I managed to tidy up as of 2026 (mostly old learning materials I’d finished 2-3 years ago).

$Part of my physical mathematics collection$ $More books from my mathematics collection$

My favorite books

Below are the digital books I’ve enjoyed:

Récoltes et Semailles

Alexander Grothendieck

Grothendieck's autobiographical manuscript combining reflections on his mathematical work with sharp criticisms of how it was later used and credited.

Elements de Géometrie algébrique I

Alexander Grothendieck

A seminal work by Grothendieck: redefines algebraic geometry by replacing classical varieties with schemes, establishing a categorical foundation that unifies algebraic geometry and number theory through sheaves and prime ideals.

Stanislaw Ulam: Sets, Numbers, and Universes

Stanislaw Ulam

Following foundational questions about number toward a vision of mathematics as a means of constructing possible worlds.

God & Golem, Inc.

Norbert Wiener

Using the prospect of self-reproducing, adaptive machines to ask where human responsibility lies once creation begins to escape its creator’s control.

Spinors and Space-Time

Roger Penrose

Showing how spinors expose the hidden algebra of relativity, with the geometry of light determining the structure of space-time.

Fukaya Categories and Picard-Lefschetz Theory

Paul Seidel

Constructs Fukaya categories from Lagrangian Floer theory and applies their algebraic structure to Lefschetz fibrations and Picard-Lefschetz monodromy.

Higher Topos Theory

Jacob Lurie

Develops quasicategories through fibrations, adjunctions, limits, presentability and ∞-topoi, supplying foundations now used throughout derived and homotopical mathematics.

Process and Reality

Alfred North Whitehead

Proposong a process-based metaphysics where reality is composed of interrelated events and experiences instead of stable substances.

Prometheus Bound

Aeschylus

A defiant tragedy of knowledge and power, paid for with endless suffering.

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

Quentin Meillassoux

Part of the OOO lineage, arguing that philosophy escape human-centered 'correlationism,' where contingency underlies everything.

A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism

James Clerk Maxwell

Maxwell's work that synthesized all known electromagnetic phenomena into one mathematical framework, introducing the displacement current to complete equations that govern light as an electromagnetic wave.

Mathematics of Quantization and Quantum Fields

Jan Dereziński & Christian Gérard

Builds bosonic and fermionic field theory from CCR and CAR representations, Fock spaces, quasi-free states and Bogoliubov transformations before treating interacting Euclidean fields.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects

Gilbert Simondon

Machines evolving and individuating alongside humans.

Cosmicomics

Italo Calvino

A collection of imaginative, playful short stories where a narrator named Qfwfq recounts the birth and evolution of the universe through fiction.

Permutation City

Greg Egan

A software copy tests whether consciousness depends on any particular machine, then confronts the possibility that a mathematically consistent world can sustain its own reality.

Tentamen novae theoriae musicae

Leonhard Euler

Turning consonance into an arithmetic problem, deriving each interval’s degree of agreeableness from the prime factors of its frequency ratio.

Summa Technologiae

Stanisław Lem

Treating technology as an evolutionary process that may transform human cognition until knowledge itself becomes something designed.

Hypercomputation: Computing Beyond the Church-Turing Barrier

Apostolos Syropoulos

Syropoulos examines theoretical machines that could solve problems inaccessible to every Turing machine, asking whether the Church-Turing thesis defines a genuine limit on computation.

The Iliad

Homer

Epic poetry on how the pursuit of honor and immortality grinds human lives against the hard fact of death.

Omnicide

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

A feverish philosophical descent into annihilation through war diaries, mysticism, and surreal violence.

Ethics

Baruch Spinoza

Reality as one necessary substance, and that human freedom lies in understanding its laws.

Imaginaries in Geometry

Pavel Florensky

Florensky turns imaginary numbers into a geometry in which Dante’s journey marks a transition from physical space into the Empyrean.

My favorite websites (clickable)

The Stacks Project

A massive, open-source collaborative reference (over 7,000 pages) that builds algebraic geometry entirely from scratch. It is currently the best resource for learning about algebraic spaces (including non-quasi-separated ones, making it more general than Knutson's monograph).