Hannukah is coming soon, and I’m probably going to ask for books. I’m very interested in math, and less so in science. I guess anything non-fiction is acceptable, too.
Any recommendations?
The Millenium Problems - Keith Devlin
The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle In The Dark - Carl Sagan
Cosmos - Carl Sagan
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and Americas Campaign to Create a Master Race - Edwin Black
The Elegent Universe - Brian Greene
The Universe In A Nutshell - Steven Hawking
These are two of my favorites, and I’m pleased to say that the latter did not break my brain, although I thought it would a couple times.
I also recommend:
Coming of Age in the Milky Way - Timothy Ferris
Beak of the Finch - Jonathan Weiner
Darwin’s Ghost - Steve Jones
And my friend LaurAnge just recommended a book to me that sounds like it would fit in here, Zero, by Charles Seife.
Chaos by James Gleick. It’s a non-fiction book that talks about chaos theory. Great for anyone interested in the practical and artistic applications of mathematics.
The Mismeasurement of Man by Stephen J. Gould. Talks about how societal biases have crept in supposedly “objective” science.
Innumeracy : Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Social Consequences
by John Allen Paulos (Author)
I enjoyed The Advent of the Algorithm as a semi-layman’s book about what the title says. I’ve found his discussion of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems to be pretty good since he basically proves the theorem (he doesn’t, but gives great detail on how it was done without getting into the complicated nature of mathematical “completeness”). The reviewers at Amazon don’t seem to have liked it but they also seem pretty misguided. It isn’t a five star book or anything but the interludes are enjoyable and the story is interesting.
The Mathematical Experience is an excellent read about math.
If you want to punish your brain you could try Gödel, Escher, Bach. He spends a lot of time on a number theory in the book, though. If you’re not comfortable with math and logic I’d give this one a pass.
I was going to mention Chaos and Elegant Universe but got beaten to it.
Genuis is an excellent book by James Gleick and is basically a biography of Richard Feynmann - anything by Feynmann is also worth a read - 6 easy pieces, 6 not so easy pieces, quantum electrodynamics, and on a less intense note, the autobiographical “surely you’re joking mr. feynmann” and “the pleasure of finding things out”.
On the off chance you have any interest in particle physics, I am utterly enamored of The God Particle by Leon Lederman.
Genius by Richard Gleick is a biography of Richard Feynmann, and is very good. Feynmann’s two anecdote-books, “Surely you’re Joking, Mr Feynmann”, and “What do you care what other people think” are both supremely excellent reads.
More of a chemistry / physics / engineering / history book, but The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is a pretty amazing book. Granted it’s about 600 pages long and it took me three tries to get through it, but I recommend it every chance I get, nonetheless. Rich detail, no stone unturned… from the discovery of cathode rays to the destruction at Hiroshima, and every step between.
As far as science/society/history goes, anything by James Burke is first rate.
And an anti-recommendation – I bought a book called The Man who Knew Infinity about the Indian mathematical prodigy Ramanujan, who studied at Cambridge in the early 20th century, made a good name for a couple of Brits, and died from the climate and odd food. Great story. Excrable book.
…aaand I see that Green Dragon beat me on the Feynmann connection. The perils of composing a post and feeding a baby at the same time…
…aaand I see that Green Dragon beat me on the Feynmann connection. The perils of composing a post and feeding a baby at the same time…
Watson’s DNA: The Secret of Life. The new updated version is not only informative and easy to read, but the hologram cover looks gorgeous.
The How and the Why by David Park is an excellent book on the history of physics, particularly in its explanations of what ancient and medieaval natural philosophers were up to. Its treatment of modern physics is a bit of a rough slog, though.
If Space Time and Quanta by Robert Mills is in print it is an excellent overview of modern physics up to Q.E.D. and requires no more than high school algebra and a little trig.
John Gribbin and Timothy Ferris are both excellent and Accesable writers.
I apologize for the overuse of the word excellent and the mis-spelling of accessible in my post above. Please don’t hold it against the books.
The Pleasures of Counting by T.W. Korner is a good book on the history of mathematics in everyday life. He deals with things like the Enigma code, cholera epedemics, the use of mathematics in warfare etc etc. It requires you to know some maths, for the examples, but the main text is very well written for the layperson with an avid interest in these sort of things.
Are Universes Thicker than Blackberries? By Martin Gardner. Math, Science, Philosophy AND Literature!
The Code Book by Simon Singh is an excellent read, covering codemaking and codebreaking from the earliest times right up to manipulating quantum spin states on smart credit card chips. Not too mathematically dense but the complexities involved (in Large Prime Factorizations, for example) are well portrayed.
This same author wrote “Fermat’s Enigma” which I have not read but I understand is excellent.
I second the recommendation for The Making of the Atomic Bomb It’s long, but extremely well written and a fascinating account of the history and science behind the making of the bomb.
I would also recommend any of Steven Pinker’s books on cognitive science, particularly How the Mind Works
I find Stephen Jay Gould’s books on Evolutionary Biology (the Panda’s Thumb, the Flamingo’s Smile, etc.) fascinating.
Herbert Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial is an amazing, almost uncategorizable, one of a kind masterpiece. It’s from one of the father’s of cognitive science, information processing and artificial intelligence (although he never much liked that last term), and is an argument for a science of design.
But on rereading your post, I see you want math books. Well, I’ll second Chaos and Goedel, Escher, Bach (while confessing–shamefacedly–that both are still, after all these years, both on my list of books that I’m “going to read real soon.”)
I second anything by Martin Gardner; he has a gift for explaining many of the weirder aspects of math and science in a clear manner. And I third Godel, Escher, Bach. My stepfather had a copy that I would thumb through from time to time, very interesting stuff in there for the scientifically inclined.
This sort of question has been asked before, so if you don’t get enough suggestions here (many of which I fully agree with), a search for similar threads will turn up more.
William Dunham’s Journey Through Genius and The Mathematical Universe are about as good as popular math books get.
I’ve also enjoyed math books by John Allen Paulos, Martin Gardner, Keith Devlin, Ian Stewart, Calvin Clawson, Sherman Stein, and Stanley Ogilvy.
And there’s not one but two entertaining, accessible biographies of Paul Erdos: Schechter’s My Brain Is Open and Hoffman’s The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.