I have recently started reading Introduction to Symplectic Topology by McDuff and Salamon and I came across this picture:
I find it very funny and really interesting. I read on Wikipedia that Ian Stewart had come with this expression when discussing about the non-squeezing theorem in an article in Nature. But Introduction to Symplectic Topology is an advanced book on symplectic topology and not a maths popularization book so I found it quite odd.
Then I remembered I saw another curious picture:
which is taken from Bredon's Topology and Geometry.
My question is: does anyone know any other peculiar images from advanced maths books that illustrate some mathematical concept?
V.I. Arnold likes to use cats for their illustrations when explaining higher-level actions with transformations. In their book "Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics", there are these images:
Or these images from their book "Ergodic problems of classical mechanics":
Their liking for images of cats used to describe things in their works is what created this: Arnold's cat map. On that page, there is this figure for the Discrete Cat Map:
In W.W. Sawyer's book Mathematician's Delight, in the Chapter "From Speed to Curves" where it's talked about the applications of the second derivative, it has one of my all-time favorite images of a stickperson: