There are four reading lists published here. Click on the name of the discipline you want to explore for the relevant list.
Representing each area of endeavor is a particularly influential figure. For mathematics, I have chosen Leonhard Euler, my favorite mathematician and the father of large swathes of modern mathematics. For philosophy, I selected René Descartes, the French polymath who contributed to mathematics in the form of the Cartesian coordinate system and to philosophy in his Discourse on Method (Discours de la méthode) and Meditations on First Philosophy (Méditations métaphysiques). For literature, I selected the Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne), three of the most highly regarded women of Victorian English literature (and authors of two of my favorite novels from the British canon). Finally, for linguistics, I selected Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of structuralist linguistics and the author of the Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), which is the branch of linguistics that informs the modern study of the subject.
Each of these lists has been curated with the outside influence, if not the aid, of the math, philosophy, literature, and linguistics communities of the Internet. Some of the sources I have used to start these lists include:
- My own personal experiences (especially for the math and literature lists),
- The YouTube channels of Dr. Adam Walker, Cinzia Du Bois, Dr. Jared Henderson, and Edgar Grunewald, as well as the pseudonymous channels Mathematical Toolbox and NativLang,
- Recommendations from various university and high school syllabi (too numerous to list) and the Great Books list from St. John’s College, and
- Recommendations given to me by the ChatGPT generative AI service, which are more often than not inspired by the above sources but in a form which enables my laziness to a greater degree.
If you have a recommendation to add here, please send email to wae@vsdev.org and I will review your suggestion. Further recommendations for YouTube channels will also be eagerly welcomed, as the algorithm doesn’t always do the best job of recommending worthy channels to me.