A Mathematician's Apology

A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy. Went into it thinking I was reading a book on math and ended up reading a book about life.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger because of the Holden Caulfield in me who couldn't tolerate all the phoniness around. Also enjoyed The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel. After reading about Hardy in this book, I have read "A Mathematician's Apology" which was excellent too.

Here's a few I've really liked that have a broader subject matter than only what you asked for. I figure that if you like to read you'd like these books. --- NON-FICTION --- Darkness Visible A Mathemematician's Apology Omnivore's Dilemma Fermat's Enigma The Code Book Born to Run Judgement of Paris Siddhartha Killing Pablo The Victorian Internet Lone Survivor I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman Papillon Into Thin Air Born on a Blue Day Touching the Void Got Fight The Conquest of Happiness --- FICTION --- Switch Bitch Lost Horizon The Cuckoo's Egg The Simlarillion The Time Traveler's Wife The Alchemist The Count of Monte Cristo A Canticle for Leibowitz Neverwhere My Uncle Oswald Stories of Your Life and Others Invisible Cities Life of Pi Atlas Shrugged --- WALL STREET / FINANCE --- When Genius Failed Liar's Poker Buffett (Lowenstein) Bull! Black-Scholes and Beyond (textbook) Fixed Income Securities (textbook) The Road to Serfdom The Smartest Guys in the Room Fortune's Formula The Fourth Turning Inside the House of Money --- ENTREPRENEURSHIP / COMPUTERS (non-textbook) --- Masters of Doom It's Not About the Bike Dot. Bomb Founders at Work The PayPal Wars…

A Mathematician's Apology is a beautiful read, by definitions both plain and, to some degree, those elaborated in the essay itself. One interesting thing about the relevancy of the essay is the potential change in the aesthetics of mathematics in wake of the proof of the Four Color Theorem. Personally, I have to believe that some day someone will find a proof that has all the elegance mathematicians are looking for. "We do not want many ‘variations’ in the proof of a mathematical theorem: ‘enumeration of cases’, indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument. A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way." If you consider his constant foil in Chess, it's fun to think that perhaps he'd see some degree of beauty in computer algorithms that solve the many enumerations of chess in far more "general" and "surprising" ways.

I just read A Mathematician's Apology. Really interesting, it really puts Hesse's Glass Bead Game in context.

When I was a kid, the documentary series Connections. It was the first time I'd ever seen someone follow vectors through history instead of recounting it one period at a time, like most books and classes do. Discovering Lisp was a big one. This was in 1983, when the default programming language was Pascal. Lisp seemed (and in retrospect was) startlingly better. There was no one single book or quotation, but I remember how excited I was to get my hands on a photocopy of the InterLisp manual. Kenneth Clark's documentary series Civilisation (and the accompanying book) impressed me a lot. In fact, it was clearly the model for Connections. I've never read anything else better about art. His ideas are extremely subversive, but few get it because he usually speaks in code. And he had access to stuff like no one else ever will again. I also learned a lot from his book The Nude. One of the biggest influences on my ideas about startups was an essay by TJ Rogers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. I don't remember the title, but it cut through the usual corporate bullshit like a knife. For me the important thing was not just what he said, but that one could even be that candid.…