I am in the middle of rethinking my personal research and to that end debating about how much of my current reading list I should stick to. Here is what I have planned for the next couple of months:
Surreal Numbers by Donald Knuth: A mathematical novelette that the Don used as an introduction to John Conway’s fascinating concept of Surreal Numbers.
On Numbers and Games by John Conway: The Game Theoretic concepts whose solutions led Conway to discover Surreal Numbers. I have been told this is an extraordinary book full of insight.
Sphere Packing, Lewis Carroll and Reversi by Martin Gardner: The usual collection of Martin Gardner’s columns from the Scientific American. I chanced upon the book in a random bookstore here in Seattle and couldn’t resist getting it after reading the chapter on Polyominoes.
I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter: Stopped reading this half way through because I found Hofstadter’s explanations redundant and his tone patronizing. This is nowhere close to Godel, Escher and Bach. But it had some fascinating ideas nevertheless and is probably worth completing.
The reason for the rewiring being that my free time research has drifted so so so far away from what i studied in college, what i used to do for a living and what i do for a living, that I have a hard time keeping up with all of them. While I still find operating systems and programming interesting, I figured it might be a good idea to learn some Haskell and investigate some Linux and Plan 9 internals. I am finding it tough to convince myself about it though: Transfinite Ordinals are infinitely more interesting (note and excuse the pun) than the fact that a bunch of people cannot agree on what O_DIRECT means.
Filed under: Books, Computer Science, DEK, Google, Mathematics, Rants
That’s a good list. But if you have some more time, you can read Logicomix. It’s a good novel. And “-oh my God-it’s full of stars!” – the same kind of stars that appear in Godel, Escher and Bach (GEB).
I am currently reading “Hexaflexagons, Probability Paradoxes and Tower of Hanoi” by Martin Gardner. Awesome! After you finish reading the listed collection of yours, you can start this.
One funny incidence. I was in Texas, when I ordered GEB through Amazon. And Amazon’s collaborative filtering software suggested me local psychologists and therapists! I, of course, increased the root-mean-square prediction error by not responding to it!!
@ Sundar:
Waiting to go back to the EU to order Logicomix because Amazon refuses to ship it to me here ! And thanks for the tip about the other Martin Gardner – you aren’t making it any easier for me to decide about my reading list
As for the Collaborative Filter, I would guess that clicking on the suggestion and then closing the window after a few seconds will have increased the RMSE even more