imagining objects and moments into existence
By A. N. Whitehead, 1929, 247 pages, amazon At the beginning of this semester prof. Kriegsmann, who teaches us Asymptotics II, was gone for a few lectures and prof. Booty was filling up for him. I have to admit that the fluid flow problem that he went over with us during that time was not too interesting for me. But…
ďalej...By Jared Diamond, 1997, 480 pages, amazon Or The Fates of Human Societies This is a very insightful book, which attempts to explain why certain societies seemed to have advantages over others when the two met – especially, why it were the Europeans who conquered the Americas and not vice versa. In order to answer this question, the author goes…
ďalej...By Frederik Pohl, 2000, 336 pages, amazon This book is the second one in the (sci-fi) Heechee saga (preceded by Gateway). Even though it is quite self-contained and can be read separately, I would not recommend doing that. In fact, I would not recommend the book at all, read the Gateway instead. Why? Not quite sure, it just doesn’t feel…
ďalej...By Jennifer Block, 2007, 336 pages, amazon The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care This book is not an easy reading. It brings tears and fear. Not of childbirth, but of US hospitals. Belongs to the same category as the movie The Business of Being Born. Why is it so scary? Because it tells stories of women who…
ďalej...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…
ďalej...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…
ďalej...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…
ďalej...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…
ďalej...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…
ďalej...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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