life in progress

Bringing Down the House

By Ben Mezrich, 2002, 257 pages, partial text, amazon Even tough the book boasts that this is “The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions” and was listed in the non-fiction list when it became a bestseller, large portion of it is indeed fiction. But even knowing this it is a very catchy reading. “So you…

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A Mathematician’s Apology

By G. H. Hardy, 1940, 153 pages, partial text, amazon I propose to put forward an apology for mathematics; and I may be told that it needs none, since there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reason or bad, as profitable or priceworthy… A mathematician does need not now consider himself on the defensive… The public does…

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Does God Play Dice?

By Ian Stewart, 1989, 317 pages, partial text, amazon This is a book about chaos. Not the chaos you have in your closet after three years of not cleaning it up but the mathematical chaos. And it is written with almost no equations at all, which makes it highly readable for non-mathematicians, but leaves the mathematicians somewhat hungry by not…

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Guesstimation

By Lawrence Weinstein and John A. Adam, 2008, 301 pages, amazon What does guesstimation mean? Something between guess and estimation or even better – a little bit of both. Subtitle of this book is “Solving the world’s problems on the back of a cocktail napkin” suggests what this book is about. Shows you how to guess/estimate answers to some not…

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From Computer To Brain

By William W. Litton, 2002, 363 pages, partial text, amazon The introduction to this book (which talks about the foundations of computational neuroscience) is hilarious: This book is for undergraduates and beginning graduate students…because the malleable mind of the undifferentiated stem-person of college age is likely to be capable of making conceptual leaps that more ossified brains cannot… these are…

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The Kite Runner

By Khaled Hosseini, 2003, 371 pages, amazon I’ve read some good reviews about this book and then (without reading it first) gave it as a Christmas present to one of my friends (of course, with the intention to borrow it one day). Sometime later I asked her how was the book. She told me she had to stop reading it….

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The Quest for Consciousness

By Christof Koch, 2004, 429 pages, partial text, amazon People know Francis Crick as one on the discoverers of the DNA structure. What they usualy do not know is that for the rest of his life he was pondering another, maybe even more exciting, problem: the question of consciousness. Where does it originate? What is that awareness inside our heads?…

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Flatland – A Romance of Many Dimensions

By Edwin A. Abbott, 1884, 144 pages, full text, amazon As we can read in the introduction to Flatland: Here is a stirring avdenture in pure mathematics, a fantasy of strange spaces peopled by geometrical figures; geometrical figures that think and speak and have all too human emotions. This is no trifling tale of science fiction … it is written…

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