What preparation can I uptake in order to start studying applied maths?

Paulina Kubiliute: What preparation can I uptake in order to start studying applied maths?
I’m in secondary school, starting the senior course (year 10) this September, 2011. I decided to invest some of my time in strengthening my maths skills this summer, and I would appreciate immensely any of your experienced opinions in the suitable books I could read and use as a guide to helping me familiarize with the whole branch of maths. Thanking in advance 🙂

Answers and Views:

Answer by mcbengt
Try to find “The Pleasures of Counting” by T. W. Korner. It’s written at the advanced secondary level and each of its sections is on a different application of math. It covers a ton of topics, in physics, biology, cryptography… It’s a lot of fun to read— almost like a novel, instead of a math book. He includes a lot of references to other material, so if there is a particular topic you are interested in, you can find out about other books from there. (I wish I’d known about this book when I was in your position. But— it’s kind of expensive. I first read it in a library.)

The same author also wrote a book on applications of mathematics (mostly basic probability theory) to decisionmaking. It’s called “Naive Decision Making” and I would recommend that too if you were interested in the topic.

Anybody with an interest in applied math should learn at least one computer programming language. Unfortunately I don’t know of any good books specifically about programming. There is a great book, however, on the math that computer scientists (and others who compute) need to know: “Concrete Mathematics” by Ronald Graham, Donald Knuth, and Oren Patashnik. It’s written at the university level, but I don’t think it would be inaccessible to a motivated student.

Hope this helped.