good math books
chollida1: I've seen a few people recommend The Princeton Companion to Mathematics(PCM) http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8350I own this book and while I do agree it's a great book for getting a 10000 foot view about topics in mathematics it's not really a book one read to learn the math that the poster is asking for.I agree with another post here that said studying is doing problems and being able to do them again a week later without having to consult the text again.PCM isnt a good book for learning calculus, discrete math, probability or statistics( what the posters wants to learn) simply because it isn't designed to teach them.  There are no problems/solutions in the book to try.If you really want one book then I'd recommend Concrete Mathamatics http://www.amazon.com/Concrete-Mathematics-Foundation-Comput...
by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik.  It has relevant topics and problem sets that you can work through to see if you truly did learn anything when reading it.