And so it continues…

This is a quick update on the status of the stack of the books I am reading. I am glad that it’s changing and worrying that its size remains the same overtime. The issue is, as I already mentioned in other posts, good books reference other good books and here we go. This time the culprit was Mind and the Cosmic Order book by Charles Pinter that mentioned the Selfish Gene and the ‘meme’ term created by Richard Dawkins. I have to say that I’ve heard about this book a long time ago, but never thought it was worth reading. But since a number of authors respected by me mentioned it I could no longer skip reading in. I should also mention that David Deutsch mentioned the meme term, coined by Dawkins, in his The Beginning of Infinity book. So did Jeff Hawkins in his recent A Thousand Brains book.

By the way, did you know that the preface to Jeff Hawkins’ book was written by Richard Dawkins?

The books that were on the stack physically or virtually since the last time

• Mind and the Cosmic Order by Charles Pinter (A Book of Abstract Algebra brought me here)
• The Right Kind Of Crazy by Adam Steltzner (well, have you heard about Curiosity and Perseverance?)
• The Interstellar Age : Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell (courtesy of watching a documentary on YouTube)
• A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (following him since 2004)
• Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb (a Google suggestion)
• Unknown Quantity by John Derbyshire (I read the Prime Obsession so it was a natural continuation)
• All Things Being Equal by John Mighton (was referenced by Anders Ericsson in his book on expertise )

Currently in progress

Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz (well his text book on dynamic systems is a culprit). With regard to Steven Strogatz I want to mention his article he wrote for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society in 2014. In this article he descried tips on successful popular-science writing.

Writing about Math for the Perplexed and the Traumatized

Next to be popped from the stack

Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (mentioned by David Deutsch, Jeff Hawkins, Charles Pinter and others)

Rest of the stack

• A Book of Abstract Algebra by Charles Pinter (Unknown Quantity sparked an interested in abstract algebra in me)
• Number-Crunching by Paul Nahin (Paul Nahin’s book about Oliver Heaviside brought me here)
• Discreet Mathematics by Lovasz, Pelikan and Vesztergombi (bought as a used book in 2014 while roaming in US, New Hampshire)
• Applied mathematics by J. David Logan (who can resists math?)
• Mathematical Modeling by Mark M. Meerschaert (the same as above)
• The Mathematical Experience by Davis Hersh ( bought as a used book in 2014 while roaming in US, New Hampshire )