Are there any books written using dialogues?

Last year I read Questions And Answers In School Physics. The book is based on a dialogue between a student and a teacher. A lot of concepts and ideas are seamlessly driven by the dialogue. I found the presentation to be lucid and pedagogical. I am wondering if there is books with a similar style but for mathematics.


Donald Knuth's Surreal Numbers: How two ex-students turned on to pure mathematics and found total happiness is an introduction to Conway's construction of real numbers as positions in certain two-player games. It's very readable and it's written as a series of dialogues between the titular characters.

An unpublished French translation is available online.


Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations is a set of dialogues about increasingly general versions of Euler's formula. Most people read it for the philosophy, not the mathematics, but I don't see why one couldn't go the other way.

Also, there are a large number of texts that exposit via pedagogically-motivated exercises, but don't involve multiple interlocutors. I don't know if you consider these to be "generalized dialogues," but if you do, then consider Arnol'd and Alekseev's The Abel Theorem in Problems.


Conics by Keith Kendig is written as a series of dialogues between three characters : Student, Teacher and Philosopher. Student with fresh curiosity, Teacher with an open mind and ability to make connections and Philosopher picking on subtle ideas - these three personalities together develop and explore the content.

There are lots of examples covered and several exercises are given at the end of each chapter.