Comment by hiAndrewQuinn

Let me qualify my claim. I'm thinking of the average HN reader, who is a software professional who may never have touched proof based math before - not you or I who got a perfect score on the abstract algebra final after skipping linear.

_Naive Set Theory_ was a much faster and more accessible read than even _Seven Sketches in Compositionality_ for me, and correspondingly I read it much earlier in my mathematical life. Seeing the natural numbers defined in Chapter 17 or so out of the building blocks of sets alone, more as an afterthought / convenience, was indeed what got me interested in taking a math minor in the first place. And it took, what, two weeks of self study for me to get to that point? Fantastic ROI.