another stimulus package?

“I’m a high school math teacher who is trying to assemble an extra-credit reading list. I want to give my students (ages 16-18) the opportunity/motivation to learn about stimulating mathematical ideas that fall outside of the curriculum I’m bound to teach... I am looking for books that are well-written, engaging, and accessible to someone who doesn’t have a lot of college-level mathematical training...."

i have gathered below some of the responses. a suggestion: pick two titles that appeal to you. buy one for your self and the other for someone who you think might find it useful. ideas matter. thinking matters and given the nature of the challenge that we face we all ought to be involved in it.

“Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning” by Peter Ecceles.
“Intuitive Topology” by Prasolo
The Moscow Puzzles (Kordemsky) and Mathematical Circles: Russian Experience (Fomin).
Flatland by Edwin Abbott
How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff & Irving Geis
The Code Book, by Simon Singh
George Polya’s “How to Solve It”
Imre Lakatos’s “Proofs and Refutations”
The Symmetry of Things, by John H. Conway, Heidi Burgiel, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss.
Famous Problems in Geometry and how to Solve them
Fermat’s Enigma, by Simon Singh
Fundamentals of Mathematics” by Moses Richardson
“Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea” by Charles Seife.
Forever Undecided: A Puzzle Guide to Godel”, by Ray Smullyan.
Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz.
“One, Two Three . . . Infinity” - by George Gamov was a fun general read.
Feynman’s Lectures
“Conceptual Mathematics”.
Courant & Robbins ‘What is Mathematics?’.
Weyl’s ‘Symmetry’.
The Art of Problem Solving - volumes 1 and 2 - by Richard Rusczyk and Sandor Lehoczky
Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach
J. Weeks, The Shape of Space
T. Needham, Visual Complex Analysis
one to infinity that is a collection of all the major papers of mathematicians throughout history.
From Here to Infinity by Ian Stewart.
The Knot Book by Colin C Adams.
“Number Theory in Science and Communication: With Applications to Cryptography,
Physics, Digital Information, Computing and Self-Similarity” by Manfred Schroeder.
Chaos by James Gleich.
Berlinghoff and Gouvêa, Math Through The Ages. Published by Mathematical Association of America.
Surreal Numbers, by Donald Knuth
The Book of Numbers, by John Conway and Richard Guy
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, by Richard Feynman
Chaos, by James Gleick
The Cartoon Guide to Statistics, by Larry Gonick and Woollcott Smith
The Manga Guide to Statistics, by Shin Takahashi
Richard Courant’s What is Mathematics?.

more to come. be well.