When it rains, it pours… books. Around the first of January I resolved to read fewer books than usual this year, and free up that time to work for the overthrow of the despotic/maniacal regime masquerading in Washington ;)… didn't consider it a difficult resolution since the stream of popular math books in 2017 seemed below average, and I thought that trend might continue forward. BUUUT, it’s not even April and a number of books have already caught my eye:
Recently enjoyed and reviewed Exact Thinking in Demented Times by Karl Sigmund (from 2017):
And books already in the queue include:
Skin In the Game, latest from Nassim Taleb
As a counterweight to Taleb ;) I may read Richard Thaler’s older volume, Nudge too.
Closing the Gap (on prime numbers) from Vicky Neale has gotten good reviews and looks enticing.
Sabine Hossenfelder’s upcoming Lost In Math is more physics than math, but certainly of interest.
Recently received a review copy of Weird Math by David Darling and Agnijo Banerjee, having heard nothing about it beforehand, but just leafing through it, looks possibly interesting also.
Two other 2018 volumes of some interest:
Reverse Mathematics by John Stillwell
Music By the Numbers (forthcoming) by Eli Maor
(...and, as a sidebar, trying to squeeze in Robert Wright's Why Buddhism Is True somewhere along the way as well.)
(...and, as a sidebar, trying to squeeze in Robert Wright's Why Buddhism Is True somewhere along the way as well.)
In short, so many books, so little time….
Tangentially, a person on Twitter started a #WorldviewIn5Books hashtag for folks to list 5 books that somehow represent their personal “worldview” (whatever that means to you -- and not necessarily favorite books, but ones that capture your outlook on the world):
It naturally generated LOTS of widely-varied, interesting choices, perhaps worth a look.
[ADDENDUM: one of the works I was unfamiliar with and which the above lists led me to (and I’ll pass along), is Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationality: from AI to Zombies which looks very interesting to me; so thanks for that!:
[ADDENDUM: one of the works I was unfamiliar with and which the above lists led me to (and I’ll pass along), is Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationality: from AI to Zombies which looks very interesting to me; so thanks for that!:
I've previously posted here lists of favorite popular math books, and a list of books I'd take to a desert island, but picking just 5 choices that somehow represent a worldview is much harder. I eventually settled on an idiosyncratic set for my own list:
Beyond the Hoax — Alan Sokal
Natural Prayers — Chet Raymo
Animal Liberation — Peter Singer
Who Knows? — Raymond Smullyan
Language In Thought and Action — S.I. Hayakawa
With two others as close runners-up:
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out — Richard Feynman
Pilgrim At Tinker Creek — Annie Dillard
Anyway, a sort of fun exercise to think about.
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