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Recommended Reading
Below is a list of recommended books or articles. I'll limit
myself to technical and non-fiction, even though I have a long
list for fiction. And I'll add to these as and when I get time
or read a good new book.
Influential books. These are books that have
influenced my thinking. They aren't necessarily outstanding
in writing style (some are) nor are necessarily original (some are),
but happened to be books that opened my eyes to new ideas
and new ways of thinking.
- Richard Dawkins. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. The classic on evolution
in Dawkins' passionate prose.
- Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates
of Human Societies. Changed the way I thought about
history and culture.
- Francis Fukuyama. Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity.
This book is perhaps the best complement to Diamond's
Guns, Germs and Steel, from one of the world's
most original thinkers.
For reasons I don't understand, his other books such as
The End of History and the Last Man receive more attention.
I think Trust is his best work and one that needs the full
exploration a book can provide, whereas for example, the
End of History can be summed up in an article.
- Martin Gardner. Anything written by him. You can't go wrong.
- Joel Garreau. Radical Evolution:
The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human.
The term "singularity" has become a hot buzzword in futurist
circles - it's often used to describe a point of no return
in the future when man and machine are interdependent.
In this well-written and illuminating book, Garreau
presents another, I think more compelling, definition:
it's when humans go beyond evolution to chemically and
mechanically alter our bodies and minds. The singularity
then occurs when humans split into multiple species -
the "enhanced humans" who use drugs and electromechanical
attachments to add new physical and mental "features",
and the "natural humans" who reject these in favor
of staying human. While describing the work of scientists
and engineers, he also makes clear how unprepared society
is to grapple with the attendant ethical issues.
- Daniel Goleman. Destructive Emotions. An insightful
account into the emerging nexus between neuroscience,
mental well-being and ethics. There are quite a few such
books now.
- Robert L. Heilbroner. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers. A highly readable
account of basic economics as traced through the history of the
subject. Heilbroner has a gift for lucid writing. To read more
about economics, see his more detailed
The Making of Economic Society.
- Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
Now of course I know how to read between the lines when I read
anything by Chomsky, but the very first time I heard him speak,
it was an eye-opening experience coming from years of immersion
in the "mainstream" viewpoint.
- Douglas R. Hofstadter.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
Stunning in its breadth of ideas and its innovative style,
this is the book that got me into computer science.
Hofstadter's Mind's I
is also compelling but a little more difficult to read.
I thought I'd be doing research in AI, but I ended up
doing something else. Not sure why - perhaps Lisp turned me off.
- John Horgan. The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age.
I vehemently disagree with Horgan's conclusions (for example, he
completely missed the areas of complex systems and neuroscience),
but the book makes fascinating reading and forces one to think
about the social value of funding scientific research.
- Stuart Kauffman. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. This was the book that
drew me into the science of complex systems. His other book
entitled Investigations is somewhat speculative but
worth reading for their ideas.
- Tracy Kidder. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest
of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World.
A crisp account of one of the world's most inspiring people.
- Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. A lucid account of the modern view of language acquisition.
- William Poundstone. The Recursive Universe: Cosmic
Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge.
This book was my entry into the fascinating world of
cellular automata and Von Neumann's abstraction of self-reproduction.
- William Strunk and E. B. White. The Elements of Style.
This iconic little book deserves mention as the prototype
for its genre. Other good books of this kind that I've found
very useful include Graves' Reader Over Your Shoulder,
and the series by Bruce Ross-Larson,
starting with Edit Yourself
Outstanding textbooks. These are books I haven't
really read cover-to-cover but are ones that I think I will
keep on my shelf forever. They are in this list because
they are examples of really well-written technical material.
- Olle Häggström.
Finite Markov Chains and Algorithmic Applications.
This book embodies the word gem, an exemplar
of clarity and brevity. In just over 100 pages, Haggstrom
covers tremendous ground, laying the basic probability
foundation needed for Markov chains, and then going from
there to a few applications.
- Sheldon M. Ross. Introduction to Probability Models.
Ross is surely considered one of the master textbook writers
of the day. He's written a slew of probability textbooks.
This is his most popular textbook. While some authors
leave too much proof to the reader and others bog down
in unnecessary background, Ross gets it "just right".
- Gilbert Strang. Linear Algebra and Its Applications.
A classic textbook on a classic topic. Superb introduction
of concepts via illustrative examples and, most importantly,
accompanied by motivation for why certain otherwise
dry results are important. This is a good example of
how to lay out a body of math, using examples to drive
the theory.
- Steven Strogatz. Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos.
Difficult mathematics presented engagingly and with
great, illustrative examples.
Other recommended books. These are books that didn't
fall into the very top categories above, but are nonetheless
excellent books.
- Bill Bryson. A Short History of Nearly Everything.
- Daniel Coyle. The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown..
- Malcolm Gladwell. Outliers: The Story of Success.
- David Goodstein, Judith R. Goodstein, and David L. Goodstein.
Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun.
- Thomas F. Homer-Dixon. The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future.
- Marco Iacoboni. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others.
- Robert Kanigel. The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan.
- Steven D. Levitt, and Stephen J. Dubner.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden
Side of Everything
- Steven Levy. Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology. More interesting ideas from the frontiers
of complexity.
- Michael Lewis. Liar's Poker.
- Sylvia Nasar. A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash.
- Simon Singh. The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography.
- Simon Singh. Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe.
- Simon Singh. Fermat's Enigma: The Epic
Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem.
- M. Mitchell Waldrop. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.
- Duncan J. Watts. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.
- Steven H. Strogatz. Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life.
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