What is a highly recommended book you read and hated?

I’ll start…

For months everyone kept recommending The Never King in all of my reading groups. I finally caved and read it. It was terrible, but that’s my unpopular opinion!

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helenS · 36-40, F

"What Is Mathematics?" by the late Richard Courant, and Herbert Robbins. That book is highly recommended by some, and I decided to read it a couple of years ago, to see how Courant explains mathematical problems to the general public.
I started hating the book when I realized that the main author was very much prejudiced against infinitesimals (dx). To him, only Cauchy-Weierstrass limits make sense, and infinitesimals are completely misleading. As a big fan of infinitesimals I was not exactly amused.

whisperingwillow · 36-40, F

@helenS Nothing worse than a book you feel is personally attacking you lol

DrWatson · 70-79, M

@whisperingwillow And no book can elicit such feelings like a math book! 😄

helenS · 36-40, F

@DrWatson In mild defence of Dr. Courant, the book was published at a time (1941) when infinitesimals were generally seen as something vague and not well-defined. Abraham Robinson's book "Nonstandard Analysis" (which re-established infinitesimals) was published in 1966.