While looking for some new material to read, I came across the following:
- Surely You're Joking, Mr.Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character - Richard Feynman
- Men of Mathematics - E T Bell
While I've ordered these two, others that I'm contemplating are:
The Art of Computer Programming: Vol 1-3 by Donald Knuth
Though I've read at least the first volume, I didn't know the following:
In addition to his writings on computer science, Knuth is also the author of 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated (1991), ISBN 0895792524, in which he attempts to examine the Bible by a process of stratified random sampling, namely an analysis of chapter 3, verse 16 of each book. Each verse is accompanied by a rendering in calligraphic art, contributed by a group of calligraphers under the leadership of Hermann Zapf.
Knuth published his first "scientific" article in a school magazine in 1957 under the title "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures." In it, he defined the fundamental unit of length as the thickness of MAD magazine #26, and named the fundamental unit of force "whatmeworry". MAD magazine bought the article and published it in the June 1957 issue.
- source Wikipedia
Which of course makes me want to read the book even more!
2.
Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb
This one sounds even more interesting. Particularly, since I've forgotten everything every Game theory, and also because:
The various games that are explained and, "played", for the reader actually utilize little in the way of math. Game Theory in practice is about the number of participants, the choices they have, how the games should rationally be played, and how there are played when people replace theory. The results of these games are applicable to daily life, whether it explains how a network will decide the placement of their commercials, why a person will stand in a line of unknown length, or pay more than the true value of an item (like a dollar bill). Peoples behavior often crosses from the irrational to the absurd, and many of these games will point out courses of action almost all readers will have taken at one time or another, when the rational decision was the opposite of what they chose to do.Even more intriguing. Guess I'll wait for once before filling up the stack again!
Other interesting websites of note:
- http://foldoc.org/ - free online dictionary of computing
- http://xmlliterate.sourceforge.net/index.html - XML Literate documentation
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:FOLDOC_sourced_articles - Wikipedia FOLDOC sourced articles
