OT: maths book covers

Popular physics, biology and geology books often sport beautiful covers, but all the mathematics and programming are not-actually-visually-offensive at best but more often just plain ugly.

Have you ever come across a maths book with a gorgeous cover design?

This is the best one, by a mile, I could find in my bookcase, which is a sad state of affairs:

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ethan Gross on June 11, 2016 at 4:17pm

Looking at my library, I think the usual practice is to abstract some diagram from inside and have a graphics designer jazz it up a little with some color fields. That seems to be de rigueur with Dover books. If it's a mandatory textbook, I guess they figure you don't care and they don't care.

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on June 12, 2016 at 1:14am

Best cover

The all times classic (wrong content proportions)

Most colorful

Almost there:

Cover designers are born, not made:

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 12, 2016 at 7:53am

Hi Peter, I appreciate the effort, and of course acknowledge that tastes do differ, but those all look pretty horrible to me.

Financial Modeling is a bog-standard textbook cover, nothing about it makes me want to look inside.
Princeton Companion is terribly crowded plus I dislike sideways text.
Euclid's elements has the look of a self-published book by someone whose only installed program is Word.
Conics is messy, the most striking feature of the cover is the glare/flash which is also the most irrelevant. I do appreciate the special O in the title though, that's a nice touch. Otherwise the typeface usage is far too undisciplined.
Geodesics; same typeface mess. "THE GEOMETRY OF" is a serif font, "GEODESICS" is not. Plus the faint partial image in the background is quite off-putting as well.

I did find a cover that I somewhat like while Googling the above:

Old-fashioned, sure, but crisp.

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on June 12, 2016 at 9:14am

Hmm... indeed taste is a personal matter

What about this ? (WIP, only available in landscape format: Sun Tzu's the Art of War modified by yours truly - using Maths and Architecture kills far more people):

Or that (cover demo not actually a book)?

Permalink Reply by ng5 Alex on June 12, 2016 at 8:32am

these look inviting. each with some problems here and there, but ok.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 12, 2016 at 3:26pm

Some decent attempts here Alex. 'General relativity' seems a bit cheesy to me. I don't like the way the wormhole wires just stop, makes it seem like a vase rather than actual space-time. Also the author's name unbalances the design by being the only thing on the left side of the drawing.

Геометрия is clean. Well balanced design, although the actual triangles themselves do not entice me. Same is true for 'Analytic geometry'. Balanced, clean, but boring. We've all seen rectangles, circles, diagonals and hyperbola before.

'Plane algebraic Curves'... hmm not sure. The drawings are interesting, but the font choice for the title, ugh. Just look at that 'g', the loop totally fails to balance the top. And that 'i'.... <shiver>.

Permalink Reply by epee du bois on June 12, 2016 at 11:07am

Permalink Reply by Kim hauer on June 12, 2016 at 11:38am

Mathematica 4th edition 1427 pages (2 1/2" thick) good nightime reading .....yikes!

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 12, 2016 at 3:16pm

Hmm, the elements use what I like to call the clown-palette (all primary colours together).

'Solid Shape' is ok I guess, still messy though.

'laws of form'.. really? A book with marketing quotes on the front? It has a good colour palette and I like the way the colours interact in the overlapping regions, if they'd gone with that strong approach and then resisted the urge to splatter blurb all over it it might have been nice.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 12, 2016 at 3:12pm

Yes, the first genuine nice one! Consistent fonts, interesting drawing, good background/foreground separation and good background/foreground interplay. Consistency in the segmenting using clear but not demanding horizontal lines. Restrained colour palette.

Makes me want to buy a copy.

Permalink Reply by Ethan Gross on June 12, 2016 at 3:17pm

I always thought this cover was atypically attractive. The book itself is "illustrated" with Turkish interwoven designs by the author's cousin.