Last Updated on October 3, 2024 by Editorial Team
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Math is a subject that stays with people throughout their life. You are calculating, making comparisons, finding orientation, and doing spatial reasoning assessments – and all of these actions involve math. Sometimes, for the enlightenment of the self or to restart the course left in between to get a better edge over competitors, every adult needs some math learning resource. As a parent, when you found it difficult to answer the math queries posed by your kid, you must have thought of brushing up your knowledge. Even otherwise, you must have found yourself at a tight spot because of some math concepts that you failed to understand in your school days. So, why not know about some math books for adults that can help save you from a variety of embarrassing situations, apart from giving you a chance to keep your brain agile for long?
If the idea has really set you thinking, we enlist for you here the best selling math books for adults that cover various interesting aspects like puzzle solving, pattern decoding or simply revisiting basic math concepts. Take a look.
Best selling math books for adults
1. Brain Games : Lower Your Brain Age in Minutes a Day
This math book is not a coursebook, but a collection of math-based reasoning and creative thinking centered puzzles, games, and questions. It is designed to keep those people in mind who have special needs as regards to developing math reasoning skills.
You will find a conspicuous change in memory power and reasoning ability after doing activities from this book in your free time. Many of the sections of this book can help you crack the math logical reasoning questions you come across in entrance exams also. Thus, it prepares you on various levels and helps prevent the early aging of the brain by providing it sufficient food to stay active and agile.
2. Secrets of Mental Math: The Mathemagician’s Guide to Lightning Calculation and Amazing Math Tricks
In school days exams, the examiners lay a lot of emphasis on checking the students’ methodical approach. However, the scene in real life is a little different and people have to depend on mental math more to achieve various objectives.
The authors of this book Arthur Benjamins and Michael Shermer have come up with an amazing collection of math tricks and ways to help you do lightning-fast calculations. The tricks like those useful for doing triple-digit multiplications and divisions, determining square and cube roots, and other complex equation solving can help you continue to grow into an avid mathematician. This book is certainly a useful resource for learning those things that are almost never taught in the school due to the curriculum’s limitations.
3. Math refresher course for adults
Scared of math problems and are not able to crack exams due to poor scores in maths? Are you planning to take a career where you will require a lot of math? Or you want to home mentor your child on math subject? If these are some of the objectives you want to accomplish, the book Math Refresher for Adults is the best choice.
This book can make you a fast problem solver, apart from helping you revisit all the principles and concepts of general math, geometry, and other school topics. All these topics continue to appear at some point in life. So, you can brush up your skills at any time by practicing with this math book for adults.
4. USA TODAY Jumbo Puzzle Book 2: 400 Brain Games for Every Day
With lots of crossword puzzles including numbers and words and different kinds of numbers-based challenges to meet, this Jumbo Puzzle Book is a perfect resource for stimulating your mind and maintain its agility.
This puzzle book is a happening go-to when you want to utilize your free time in brushing your math reasoning and logical reasoning skills. It is a book for all ages and can be used for challenging the advanced learners to do different kinds of math problems in addition to what they do in their course work.
5. All the Math You’ll Ever Need
All the Math You’ll Ever Need from Steve Slavin is the self-teaching guide that allows you to be proficient in math skills that you require for personal and professional purposes. In school days, just to catch up with peers, many important math concepts remain unlearned. This math guide for adults takes care of practical math, mental math, and math reasoning, that prepare you well for all day-to-day activities based on calculations.
You can find in it the concepts like fractions, decimals, discount calculation, mortgage value determination, and several important finance-focused math topics that help you make better decisions related to price and property matters. So, when you want to be math smart, use this book to self-learn and excel.
6. Mastering Essential Math Skills Problem Solving
Be a master problem-solver of math concepts with this Math Skills exercise book by the author Richard W. Fisher. This math book for adults comes with a number of everyday math problems which any adult need to master to get decisions right.
The graphs, statistics, fractions, decimals, pie-charts are common to any office work that revolves around numbers. Thus, to make that impressive presence among peers, practice the problems in this book regularly and see how you become confident in math. Just 20 minutes of practice using this book, and you can pave your way to a successful career.
7. The 125 Best Brain Teasers of All Time
Want to be the master of math and logic, and like things like doing wordplay? Then, this brain-teasing book is your best bet. Having about 125 games, puzzles, and logic-improving problems, this math book fights away the fear of math in a fun-filled way even if you’re an adult.
You can give your brain that much needed creative break that it needs from doing monotonous kind of jobs. By making use of math word problems, wordplay puzzles, and various logical reasoning based problems, this book serves you the best when you want to befriend math. The best part is, you need not be a math nerd to solve the puzzles in this book; it is designed that creatively!
8. The Math Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained
A lot of mugging up happens in the school days when the course size exceeds the reasoning power of the brain. So, what could be a better way of using adult life for revisiting those math portions that you could not understand as a young learner?
The book takes away the confusion around the terms and concepts that entered our lives at an early age. With the passage of time, almost all concepts mingle up and the real meaning is left far away from the mind. This book solves this issue like a pro and allows you to understand the real underlying meaning of terms like whole numbers, spheres, algebra, and other operations of math.
9. 300+ Mathematical Pattern Puzzles: Number Pattern Recognition & Reasoning
The author Chris McMullen has created this amazing book to help math aspirants improve their pattern intelligence. Patterns are everywhere; all you need is a brain and a thought process to crack those. This puzzle book for solving pattern recognition, pattern identification, and reasoning problems open up your brain beautifully and helps it become more receiving and inquisitive in its abilities.
Important topics covered in this puzzle book are Fibonacci square, visual puzzles, roman numerals in the number pattern problems section. And, you also get ample practice in visual discrimination, analogy establishment, logic, and reasoning in the math reasoning section. If preparing for exams, it can help you crack logical reasoning and creative thinking based problems with better ease.
10. The Original Area Mazes: 100 Addictive Puzzles to Solve with Simple Math
Simple math but clever logic are used in combination to find answers to the addictive puzzles given in this math book. This math problem-based puzzle book gives you all support that you need to develop your brain’s mental ability that due to some issues recede with age.
By practicing the problems in this puzzle book, you challenge your brain, give it a proper workout needed to keep it agile. Rules are pretty simple and do not involve more than the simple math formula like area = l x w. Whole numbers, geometry, and your love for Sudoku form the working tools for solving the puzzles given in this brain stimulating book that every adult should practice.
Why adults need these math books?
Growing cases of dementia, loss of reasoning skills, and poor spatial intelligence have started gripping people at an early adult age. Similar to games and activities which enhance an adult’s working memory, math books for adults give the grown-ups fuel for the brain so that it does not lose its thinking and logical reasoning capability with age.
Whether it is the revision of concepts that were missed in school days, or knowing the application part of the theories that you just memorized to score marks, these books offer the best support for handling all types of shortcomings.
With regular practice, the users of these math books for adults can gain confidence in the areas where they have been lacking proficiency. So, the overall result is a more confident side of yours, which you were forced to hide behind excuses.
More visible outcomes are likely to be better chances of winning promotions at the office, and better performance in exams in which math problems weight a lot.
In Conclusion
In today’s world, where people have access to calculators on their mobile phones and laptops, it is easy to lose math-solving skills. Then there are other factors like age and medical conditions that dampen the human brain and hamper its ability to carry out calculations easily.
To keep the brain sharp and active, math books prove to be an excellent resource for grown-ups who want to enhance their mathematical abilities. These books, along with a few online math games and brain teasers, can help adults enhance cognitive abilities and become proficient in calculations and reasoning. So, if you are an adult who is eagerly looking for ways to get better at math, no matter the reason behind it, do give the books mentioned above a try. Dedication and consistent practice will help you sharpen your skills and deepen your mathematical knowledge.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,