...between a mathematician and a pizza? A pizza can feed a family of four.

This indeed does place a bound on the possible existence of cosmic strings, however the description of this article seems to imply that cosmic strings have something to do with string theory. The two concepts are completely unrelated. In cosmology, cosmic strings are 1D topological defects caused by a phase change in a region of spacetime. They do not require string theory and string theory does not require them. They just happen to be two concepts in theoretical physics that used the word "string" to describe 1-dimensional entities.

I wrote a collaborative novel last year which was laid out in LaTeX. Each chapter was written by its 1-3 writers on a document I created in Google Docs. At the end, I wrote a Python script that downloaded all 23 chapters, translated them into LaTeX docs in the style that I wanted for the book layout (most of the markup I had to worry about was stuff like quotes, new paragraphs, italics, special characters, etc (it was not full of equations)), and it then called PDFLaTeX on the master document which combined them into a book. This allowed people to modify their documents online, and for me to handle the layout in parallel with the up-to-date text.

So, this allowed like 12 people to have no learning curve, but it depended on me knowing Python and LaTeX. Not sure if I answered the question. Sorry. Just use version numbers or something.

Landau and Lifshitz Classical Mechanics - concise and beautifully written. Might be stylistically appealing for someone with a background in mathematics.

Griffiths Introduction to Electromagnetism - A classic and clear introductory text. Probably his best book.

Griffiths Introduction to Quantum Mechanics - Another classic. It's also a short book. If you are looking for more Dirac notation, check out Shankar, another classic at the undergraduate level.

Reif Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics - Great and very complete introduction to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. If you find the text daunting, you could substitute it for Schroeder.

Taylor and Wheeler Spacetime Physics - Great introduction to special relativity. You'll find a more mathematical treatment in Griffiths EM or any GR book.

-----

If you are interested in reading a bit of undergraduate-level general relativity and astrophysics as well, good books are

Hartle Gravity - An UG-level intro to General Relativity. Focuses on the physics and providing you with metrics. Fun book. Try Carroll if you want something more mathematical.

Ryden Introduction to Cosmology - Great, recent introduction to cosmology at the UG level. Will give you a lot of intuition into your later studies of cosmology.

You might want to check out a good UG-level text on stellar astrophysics as well, but there's probably more than enough on your plate, unless you're some sort of robot.