Month: February 2023

Mathematics Applied For Good

Photo by Reuben Teo on Unsplash

If you inclined towards mathematics, but almost didn’t touch it since college years and want to get a math rush again, then following are the books that you may find captivating.

I should mention that these are books on Applied Mathematics which is of useful kind paraphrasing Richard Feynman. The books are ordered from easy to not so.

To start:

1. Applied Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction by Alain Goriely. This book is a gentle intro to applied math and Alain is capable of explaining things lucidly and as simple as required, but not too much.

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2. Street-Fighting Mathematics:

The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving by Sanjoy Mahajan is more involved and requires some work on readers part, but it’s a delight to read. This book is available in open access here.

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3. Next book from the same author is The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering: Mastering Complexity. It is somewhat similar to the former, but different. Again it’s open for public

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4. Now, the last one is a real textbook on Applied Mathematics by J. David Logan, but nevertheless it is interesting to read and work through.

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42 hours fast experience. To do or not to do?

Photo by Emre on Unsplash

It is 6th time that I am doing a prolonged fast (more then 24 hours). And it’s 4th time I am doing 42 hours fast. Below comes some observations.

  • It’s not getting any easier in comparison to previous fasts. First 26 hours are quite normal, but then the feeling of discomfort prevails. It’s not a hunger, but a feeling of an empty, glued and ‘vacuumed’ stomach.

  • The main difficulty is sleeping at night since I tend to wake up a number of times to drink and the dreams are quite annoying. Sometimes about food.

  • As for weight loss this time, it’s insignificant. But one possible explanation is that in the last 4 days I am doing about 120-150 pushups a day in addition to usual walking about 7000 steps. And yesterday while doing 42 hours fast I did 200 pushups throughout the day. So it seems like there is no weight loss. When actually, fat has lessened, but muscles have grown. Visually, I see less fat, than ever.

  • Will I continue to do extended fasts? Well, it seems like I won’t but I am for 24 hours fasts, since they are a piece of cake (oh no, carbs are even here 🙂 )