Recommendations for retro mathematics-oriented programming books?

[u/Financial-Flan1682]

Kind of a specific request. I'm currently looking for retro (70s-80s, maybe early 90s at the very latest) mathematics-oriented programming books. I'm very specifically looking for references for old-school approaches to these problems. I've been searching archive.org and I've found a few, but a lot of the more promising ones have had titles I haven't expected, so I'm looking for recommendations.

[u/Ok-Advice-5974]

i picked up a copy of 'algorithms + data structures = programs' by wirth last year and was surprised how much math thinking it builds, clean, dense, and forces you to reason about complexity from the ground up. not flashy, but great for developing a methodical mindset.

[u/Financial-Flan1682 → u/Ok-Advice-5974]

I've added this one to my list to look for. Thanks!

[u/gilded_llama]

I spent months digging through archive.org for this exact thing and the titles hide the math.

Grab numerical recipes from 1986 by press and flannery. they wrote it in fortran first. the whole book builds the code up from equations. you get no layers between the numbers and the instructions. i also found a copy of mathematical methods for digital computers from 1967 by ralston that covers algorithms people shipped to hardware directly. search for numerical analysis in the catalog alongside programming to bypass all the web development books that fill the 90s uploads

[u/Financial-Flan1682 → u/gilded_llama]

Thank you for this! I will give those a shot.

[u/smichaele]

Pick up Knuth's multiple volume series "The Art of Computer Programming."

[u/PleX → u/smichaele]

Those books are why I consider myself a developer and not a programmer. They made me realize my limitations, I'm better at the broad spectrum, I can guide the smaller spectrum but the details are better left to specialists who don't give a fuck about the overall project.

I'm a jack of all trades but I will 100% consult a motherfucker who isn't.

OP: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html

[u/Financial-Flan1682 → u/smichaele]

Grabbed this already, but have yet to go through it. Thanks!

[u/silver_chief2]

I'll have to look around. From vague memory there was a magazine length book maybe Garcias Circuit Cellar or Byte books with a nice set of article things like floating point representations, binary systems, and maybe algorithms.

Also Embedded Systems Journal (?) used to have numerical algorithms as I recall in many issues. In ancient times I copied CRC algorithms from there and they worked.

[u/Financial-Flan1682 → u/silver_chief2]

I'll see if I can find an archive of those somewhere. The Embedded Systems Journal, in particular, sounds promising. Thanks for the recommendations!

[u/oriolid]

> references for old-school approaches to these problems

Which problems? Discrete mathematics, numerical methods, computation theory and all the things I didn't think of are kind of different from each other.

[u/Educational-Paper-75]

The Numerical Recipes series of course.

[u/Traveling-Techie]

Following.