Great Ideas of Modern Mathematics (Dover Books on Mathematics) First Paperback Edition

I am always looking for introductions to group theory that are appropriate for high school and middle school students and Singh's chapter on the topic is very helpful.

The first few chapters are very good, providing a convincing arguent for the general trend towards more abstract mathematics. In particular I liked the introduction of complex numbers (have you ever considered the product of two numbers as a vector product and wondered about the geometrical interpretation?; I had not, and this made me think).However, much of the rest of the book covers subjects that were in a state of flux when the book was written: the coverage of relativity is confused (for a maths book, some of the text is very applied - a comon thread is the unification of abstract and applied approaches); the statistics section focuses on issues later largely resolved by Kolmogorov (Markov chains); references to quantum mechanics favour hidden variable theories; the section on the logical foundation of mathematics barely mentions Godel and was apparently written before ZF(C). In one way this is good - it provides a clear historical context (mystical interpretations of special relativity!) for the subjects - but the author's strong assertion of ideas that must have been controversial at the time, and which have since been discarded, is less than helpful in retrospect.I regret having paid full price for this - but I would recommend reading the first few chapters if you pick it up second hand.