Research and Reading
I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research regarding the Fusor. I have some things I want to try with it, rather than just simply ticking the box on achieving fusion, and that means I need some new ideas. This page is a listing of information, math, videos, books, articles etc. that I have read and I think are generally pertinent towards this goal. I’m really not too sure how to organize all this, it’s not like I have some sort of system setup, basically if I think a bit of information is interesting I read/watch/engage with it and then I put it up here. Included are things about modern science, ancient science, mathematics, hoaxes, frauds, engineering, sociology, and on and on. I’m slowly adding everything I’ve done so far, and I’ll try to include short comments where appropriate, but as of right now the list is incomplete! Rest assured I found everything here interesting.
Currently Reading - What Engineers Know and How They Know It - Walter G Vincenti -
How Does Invention Occur?
Videos
- Everything is a Remix - Kirby Ferguson - A wonderful video about how the essence of creativity and innovation is recombination. I have watched this multiple times.
- Looms, Weaving and Cumulative Culture - Christopher Buckley - Fascinating 3-part series about the cultural transmission of knowledge in the context of looms and weaving in southeast asia. Lots of great tidbits.
- Talking Funny - Seinfeld, CK, Gervais and Rock - I don’t really know why comedy grabs my attention so much, but watching these people talk about their craft is the most fascinating thing to me.
- I promise this story about microwaves is interesting - Tom Scott - Invention is weirder than you think and also so much more wonderful. LOVELOCK
Interviews
- Conversations with Tyler - Peter Thiel - Tyler Cowen’s interview series is always worth your time, but in particular this discussion with Peter Thiel is fascinating. Thiel’s thesis around technological stagnation is, I think, rather well known at this point, and here you get to listen to a very good summary of it. The first step in solving a problem is understanding that you have one.
- The Tim Ferriss Show - Jerry Seinfeld - I think a lot of creative work has some fundamental similarities. Making a new scientific theory, creating a work of art, writing a novel, or making new jokes, these are all making a new thing. Jerry Seinfeld in particular has had a very long creative career, and he’s handled the transition from network TV to the internet very well. I think his Comedians in Cars getting Coffee series is the most youtubey professional show I’ve ever watched. So in that vein, why not listen to the guy to figure out how he’s stayed so creatively productive for so long?
- Jim Clark - Oral History - Besides being a wonderful character in Stephen Lewis’ The New New Thing, he’s had his hand in a lot of technology that directly impacted me. He helped bring computer special effects to the fore with his company Silicon Graphics seen most vividly in the greatest movie of the 90’s Jurassic Park, he created the chip that powered the Nintendo 64 that I played for hours with my friends growing up, and he ushered in the internet revolution by founding Netscape with Marc Andreessen. Just a fascinating tale all around.
- Margaret Hamilton - Oral History - One of the greats, so much fascinating work was done. Her role in the initial discovery of chaos theory (she did a bunch of programming for Edward Lorenz), her work on Apollo, error detection, so many things! Just foundational stuff.
- Forging the mRNA Revolution — Katalin Karikó - “The only thing in the periphery is freedom”.
History + Sociology
Books
- The Mold on Dr. Florey’s Coat- Eric Lax - How was penicillin invented? Everyone knows Fleming was involved, but all of the work to make it into a real drug someone could take to cure an infection was done by a laboratory at Oxford. Very much worth a read, especially with the backdrop of the war.
- The Wizard War- R.V. Jones -A wonderful tale about how scientific intelligence for the British worked during the 2nd world war. It’s a fascinating story, and so well told, its great for its explanation of how to make decisions under great uncertainty and also its just a first class book.
- Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology - Paul Rainbow - A sociological discussion of how PCR, the DNA amplification technique was invented. Hugely interesting and filled with a lot of details, the initial insight of Kary B. Mullis, brought about by his interaction with computers and his work in chemistry and biology had to be tamed by a group of very talented scientists. Without that work to make the insight a real thing, it might have died the death that many striking insights do.
- The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to be Reborn - Lucio Rosso - Worth reading for its description of science alone. If I had to summarize the book in a single sentence I’d go with “Read old nearly forgotten work to make something new”.
- The Glass Bathyscaphe - Alan Macfarlane and Penny Tweedie - A good read about how glass made many technologies possible. Imagine chemistry without glassware, biology without the optics of the microscope, it’s impossible. A lot of fascinating history is included, what is the link between better bureaucracy and reading glasses? What about perspective in art, the window and projective geometry in mathematics? Very much worth reading.
- The Invention of the Modern World - Alan Macfarlane - A series of essays by the Cambridge anthropologist on how England and Great Britain came to be at the center of industrialization and modernization. Lots of fascinating tidbits about the relationship between religion and men, the pre-existing mechanisation with waterwheels and windmills and the social structure of the society.
- Skunk Works - Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos - An overview of one of the most innovative areas of aircraft design in the US. Lots of great information about the development of the U2 and everyone’s favourite the SR-71. Goes into some detail about the first stealth fighter and how the whole Skunkworks was organized. Of note is the frustration with increasing security requirements that appeared from the 70’s onwards.
- Operation Paperclip - Annie Jacobsen - I have no clue if this is the best history of operation paperclip but it seems alright. A good overview of how the US brought over numerous Nazi scientists in the immediate aftermath of the second world war and put them to work. Everyone knows about Werner Von Braun (who cares where the rockets come down?) and the role they played in the Apollo program, but lots of other details are fleshed out. Nerve gas, human exposure experiments to cold, plenty of nasty individuals came over!
- Masters of Doom - David Kushner - A fascinating history of the early days of id software, makers of Doom. I spent a lot of time playing this game in my youth and its crazy to me just how young Carmack and his compatriots were. There’s a wonderful line in the book when they’re talking about key-man insurance for the company, “no one else matters”. How far back would computer graphics be without Carmack? Perhaps Peter Thiel’s heroic vision of technology is the right one.
- The Decadent Society - Ross Douthat - An essay about America and why she is the way she is right now. Probably best read in conjunction with Tyler Cowen’s complacent class. Many comparisons to Rome and its fall from grace. Perhaps the best explanation of the current navel gazing American politics seems to be engaged in.
- The Origins of AIDS - Jacques Pepin - When is a plague man-made and when is it not? A very thorough investigation into the origins of a slow burning disease. The construction of railways, hunting for game meat, poorly sterilized needles in public health campaigns, it’s all in here. Very well written and laid out.
- Everyday Technology - David Arnold - Technology often means large projects to people. Think Apollo or the Manhattan Project, but in terms of day to day life it’s often much more basic objects that create enduring change. We can no longer put a man on the moon, but everyone has a television in their house. This book looks at technological change in India through implements like the typewriter and sewing machine, very much worth reading to shift one’s perspective on what real innovation for society looks like.
- Cathedral Forge and Waterwheel - Frances and Joseph Gies - After the collapse of Greece and Rome, and the passage of the Dark Ages, how did technology progress during the middle ages? The magnificent cathedrals of Europe show there was clearly some work ongoing, and the suits of armour of knights show a different type of technology. Lots of fascinating tidbits about guilds, and how things were passed from generation to generation.
- Inviting Disaster - Lessons from the Edge of Technology - James R. Chiles - How do complicated systems fail and what can we do to prevent it? A series of case studies from the Ocean Ranger, to Apollo 13 show how systems of organization fail. Lots of fascinating facts and also a healthy dose of realism about how to contain the human element inherent in all of these failings.
- The Glass Cage - Nicholas Carr - Lots of discussions around automation are pretty frustrating to read. This one isn’t, lots of deep insight into problems of automation. For example, pilots build skill while flying a plane manually, that skill helps them when they get into a serious problem. Autopilots can handle most of the standard flying tasks now, but are unable to deal with difficult edge cases. So we have a system that atrophies the skill of the pilots but hands over control to them at the worst possible time. Not ideal. How does this affect drivers with the current proliferation of driver assist technology? The book also contains a really interesting perspective on video games.
- Why Most Things Fail - Paul Ormerod - I found this book frustrating as I wanted there to be more too it, but it’s a great overview of how many plans of man simply don’t work out. Businesses routinely collapse completely, and figuring out how to make something that endures is very very hard.
- Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe - When a man commits fully to his own culture and reaps the rewards only to see it utterly eroded by forces beyond his comprehension how does he respond? I think this is a tale of tragedy in the real world, but perhaps in the world of science it is the way things should be.
- Craeft - Alexander Langlands - In a similar vein as Everyday Technology but less academic and more popular. How is technological information transmitted across generations when the modern superstructure of public research universities and accreditation for professional careers doesn’t exist? Lots of fascinating discussion about everything from how to make bee hives to fences.
- Cognitive Gadgets - Cecilia Hayes - How do we learn? Plagiarism!. A very good book about how you should learn. Copying other people’s work is highly underrated as a tool for improving. What else is a bibliography but a tool to allow you to figure out who to mimic?
- Regional Advantage - Anna Lee Saxenian - How did Silicon Valley in the 50’s 60’s and 70’s operate? What social norms drove the rapid improvement in transistor technology that gave us our modern world? Lot’s of worthwhile tidbits, key amongst them was that employees were not punished for leaving and starting their own companies. Very often their previous employer would rehire them if the company failed, or do business with them if the new company produced something worthwhile.
- The Complacent Class - Tyler Cowen - Many things I did not know about the recent history of the US I learned in this book. How many bombings were taking place in America in the early 70s? Lots, like lots per day lots. It makes the argument that all of this turmoil was solved by essentially policing America, and that this was a democratic decision. Interesting in the context of current debates about police brutality and possible solutions.
- How the Scots Invented the Modern World - Arthur Herman -
- Scientific Freedom the Elixir of Civilization - Donald Braben - I’m not too sure what to make of this book. It’s an updated call for more freedom for scientists so that they can produce good research. The author certainly has the track record to back it up, but critically seems to have only been able to achieve his aims because some benevolent managers at an oil company saw fit to fund him. Obviously the support was tempermental and when management changed it disappeared. That being said I don’t see how any government funded research will avoid the pressures he identifies as being destructive to this high quality research.
- The HP Way - David Packard - Before it became a brand on personal computers, HP made lots of critical tools for electrical engineers. In fact Steve Wozniak got his start there. That part of the company now survives as Agilent I believe, but this is a description of how such an innovative company came to be. Lots of neat tidbits about California in the pre-war and post-war era.
- Dealers of Lightning - Michael A Hiltzik - The sort of standard history of Xerox PARC and how they went about defining all of the desktop computer technology we use today. My favourite tidbit is that the secretaries of executives immediately understood the utility of the new computer, while their bosses did not.
- The Idea Factory - Jon Gertner - Everything came out of Bell Labs, the transistor, the CCD, the cell phone and on and on. This is a wonderful history of the whole place and how it did what it did.
- Where Wizards Stay Up Late - Katie Hafner - It’s a history of the early internet, covers the work done in Boston by BBN, the early nodes, how TCP/IP was invented and some of the comment letters. Good overview.
- Arts and Minds - Dr. Anton Howes - One of the things that is a little curious with England’s industrialization is that it happened with so little state support. France spent a lot on promoting industry and England did not, why then did England industrialize first? Part of the answer might lie in the social structures that promoted innovation. Enter this book, worth reading, and I should add, Anton Howes newsletter/blog is also very much worth subscribing too.
- Where is my Flying Car - J. Storrs Hall - I found this book intensely frustrating. It is at it’s most interesting when the author is pointing out tidbits like the fact that an increase in government funding for science appears to be correlated with a reduction in innovation (see Anton Howes and England v. France in industrialization?). His description of flying cars and the stifling of innovation there with past appetites for greater risk is compelling, but then he veers off into as far as I can tell crackpot territory. His description of nanoscale technologies and how these things could just be strikes me as ludicrous. Nothing behaves the way we expect at the small scale. For example, gold is purple if you turn it into a nano-particle, how do lubricants work? What about friction? I think it is fascinating we have control over atomic scales with advanced lithography, but those are essentially chemical techniques that have scaled down well with the goals in mind. I think a lot of making things that works is picking the right model that informs your decisions. I am skeptical that we have good models for small scales.
- The Revolt of the Public - Martin Gurri - This book is a fascinating read given the current context, the yellow vest protest in France, protests in Chile etc. that seem to have no leader and no end. I am curious though, about whether its ideas can be applied earlier, perhaps to the scientific domain. Maybe part of the reason science has produced so little innovation since the 1970’s is that there was a sort of analogous revolt against the elite funding mechanisms in the scientific community.
- The Wizards of Langley - Jeffrey T. Richelson - So much invention happens behind closed doors. This book discusses a bunch of very real breakthroughs that took place in the cold war. There is a lot of deeply boring exposition about interagency disputes but the technology they were inventing will take your breath away.
- Nazca - The Flight of Condor 1 - Jim Woodman - Just a fantastic book. Perhaps the lines in the Peruvian desert drawn by the Nazca were put to be seen from the air? Maybe ballooning is thousands of years old and has constantly been rediscovered. First by Brazilian Bartolomeu de Gusmao, then by the Montgolfier brothers. Jim Goodman and a group put together a balloon based on technology that was thousands of years old and flew it in the 1970s. Absolutely a first rate story.
- Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston - A series of interviews with a lot of successful startup founders. Lots of highly interesting tidbits, I especially liked those with Max Levchin and Mike Lazardis. All were worth reading.
- Tuxedo Park - Jennet Connant - Fascinating story about the development of radar in the second world war. The Tizzard mission, laboratories, lust, it’s all in here!
- The Captive Mind - Czeslaw Milosz - Absolutely fascinating read about the poison that is deception.
- The End of Science - John Horgan - Great book, I think he correctly diagnoses the problem but not the cause. All I could think while he was talking to all these scientists was that none of them really had a clue, they all seemed very lost and unwilling to admit it.
- The Goal: A business graphic novel - Eliyahu M. Goldrat, Dwight Jon Zimmerman and Dean Motter - Quick read about how to run a factory.
- New Atlantis and The Great Instauration - Francis Bacon - You have to read it.
Articles
- A Fractal of Lies - David R. Maciver - Every once in awhile you get a glimpse beyond the veil.
- Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood - Doreen Taylor - Logic is a really clumsy tool. When the domain it works in is well defined its very useful, but that’s almost never the case. As far as I can tell most of mathematics is about defining the domain so that the tools of logic and calculation can be applied to it. If you’re trying to do a new thing in a new domain that is not well defined how much can you trust the “conclusions” that have been made? I don’t think very much, I think something very similar to what the child in this article does is what happens with most new research. You have to make those erroneous conclusions though to be able to make the correct ones later on.
- The Collapse of Rational Certainty - David Chapman - David Chapman’s blog is consistently interesting, this is a great quick overview of the scientific developments in math and physics that caused a crisis of rationality. Very nice to have this put together in a coherent way.
- Why Was Western Printing Superior to Asian Printing? - Erik Engheim - Lots of details that seem trivial from a distance are in fact not at all trivial. To create a gestalt you have to micromanage.
- Forgetting the Asbestos- Areoform - Details that matter so much are quickly forgotten. Replication is difficult. To invent you can merely try to copy the past.
Biography - Auto and Otherwise
Books
- To Mars With Love - Patricia Ann Straat - A wonderful story about the development of one of the life detection experiments on the Viking Lander. Known as the Labelled Release experiment, this book details its design and invention and lays out the case that life was actually detected by the device. Sadly the author passed away in October of last year, this whole book is fascinating and deserves to be more widely read.
- Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age - Kurt Beyer - The Harvard series of computing devices were one of a number of early computing devices. Incidentally the first was directly influenced by Charles Babbage’s machine since Howard Aitken studied a demonstration machine Babbage’s son had brought to Harvard. Out of this research group came Grace Hopper, who amongst other things wrote one of the first COBOL compilers. So just a wee bit influential on the development of programming languages. Great read about how she developed the talents and skills working with an enormous physical device and the influences that had on more theoretical work like compiler construction.
- The Forgotten Genius of Oliver Heaviside - Basil Mahon - It is stunning how many of the methods modern Electrical Engineers use to solve problems are due to the genius of a single man. Working mostly alone from a young age, he basically transformed James Maxwell’s equations into the modern tools that are used today. Never paid, rarely acknowledged and full of plenty of curious quirks. Maybe you hear of him today when the Heaviside function is used, but his Operational Calculus has been subsumed in to Laplace method’s after it was put on a more rigorous mathematical footing in the 1920’s.
- The Man Who Changed Everything - Basil Mahon - James Clerk Maxwell, the great genius of the 19th century whose theoretical explanation of electromagnetic waves laid the foundation of modern society. A wonderful view in to his slightly tragic life.
- True Genius - The Life and Science of John Bardeen - Lillian Hodeson and Vicki Daitch - One thing I find very odd is how rarely the midwest of the United States is talked about as a hotbed of invention. People often like to discuss the Hungarians who built the bomb, and their undeniable genius, or Silicon Valley. But the midwest of the US birthed Claude Shannon, Robert Noyce, John Bardeen, The Wright Brothers, and Philo Farnsworth, to name a few. This book is a fascinating look at the Electrical Engineer who invented the transistor and then explained Type 1 Superconductivity, winning Nobel Prizes for both. His background, and his education was all through American institutions of Pre-War and immediate Post-War vintage. Forget DARPA, what social structures laid the groundwork for his work? We should want more of it.
- The Dream Machine - M. Mitchell Waldorp - The invention of the internet is one of the larger technological changes that has been undertaken in the modern era. The man in charge of the research program that created it’s initial form, ARPAnet, is described in this book. Well worth reading for a perspective on how the research was organized and how the talented individuals who worked on these projects were brought together.
- The Strangest Man - Graham Farmelo - A biography of Dirac, of note is his education began in a technical school for electrician types.
- Einstein: His Life and Universe - Walter Isaacson - It’s a biography of Einstein, what more needs to be said.
- The Man Who Loved Only Numbers - Paul Hoffman - About Paul Erdos, used a lot of amphetamines and cared only about mathematics. A very curious man.
- Adventures of a Mathematician - Stanislaw Ulam - A wonderful read about a well lived life, his key insight about the hydrogen bomb is why the detonation device is known as the Ulam-Teller mechanism.
- The Man Behind the Microchip - Leslie Berlin - A great read about Robert Noyce, one of the key figures in Silicon Valley from his work at Fairchild and later Intel.
- Droidmaker - Michael Rubin - I think LucasFilm should be right up there with places like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs. So much groundbreaking innovation and invention. Pixar and THX to name two both had their genesis (or part of their genesis) in the creative space George Lucas created. That he was able to do it in as brutal an industry as Hollywood speaks to his genius.
- Bossart - America’s Forgotten Rocket Scientist - Don P. Mitchell - A history of the man who built the Titan rocket for America. A hugely innovative design that used pressure to provide structural integrity to the rocket. Lots and lots of firsts by a Belgian immigrant who worked with all sorts of techniques across the nascent airplane industry and applied that knowledge to push the bounds of flight.
- The Man Who Loved China - Simon Winchester - Great story about Joseph Needham, a quirky british professor and his life’s work Science and Civilisation in China.
- Rickover The Struggle for Excellence - Francis Duncan - The man who built the nuclear navy for the Americans.
- Not Much of an Engineer - Sir Stanley Hooker - One of the key figures in the development of jet engines in Britain. So much of the technology he helped develop formed the foundation of other countries’ jet programs, America, China, Russia. Really very fascinating.
Techniques of Invention
Programming
Books
- The Pragmatic Programmer - David Thomas and Andrew Hunt - A great dissertation on becoming a craftsman. Very useful information for programmers.
- Thinking Forth - Leo Brodie - I liked this book, as always the interviews in the book with actual programmers are great to read, but I wonder if a lot of its opinions were more revolutionary when it was first published rather than now.
- Coders at Work - Peter Seibel - A series of interviews with a group of very talented coders. Lots of the technical specifics already feel quite dated in the book, but I think there’s a ton of great information about how these people go about reading and writing code. How they debug and tackle a problem is really interesting to read about.
- Sunburst and Luminary - Don Eyles - So many of the embedded programming techiques used today were first developed during the Apollo program. Here you can read about the whole process put together by a young man with some supervision and no real programming experience. Watchdog timers, priority execution, and all sorts of wonderful detail about how the LEM landed on the moon.
- The Making of Prince of Persia - Jordan Mechner - Prince of Persia was a really impressive game, made even more impressive by the fact that it’s the creation of a single person. Lots of fascinating technical details about how the look and feel of the game was achieved, and tons of information about how slow and interrupted the creative process feels. Straight from his diaries while he was writing the game this book is great to read.
Papers
- The Most Important Software Innovations- David A. Wheeler - A fascinating list focused specifically on software. Of note is that virtually all things had earlier beginnings than I suspected.
- Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? - Dr. Robert Dewar and Dr. Edmond Schonberg - A nice overview of the importance of learning how to do things of sufficient complexity from the start. A good overview of the utility of formal methods in languages like Ada.
- Big Ball of Mud - Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder - A wonderful attempt to grapple with how code often exists in the real world compared to the ideal theoretical design patterns we often are taught.
- Separation Logic - Peter O’Hearn - To be honest I only skimmed this one. I think it’s a logical method of dealing with some thorny problems when program verification is a goal. Seems to have an ability to deal with pointers and some other intertwined structures. Just didn’t have the heart to dig into the details and eat the math.
Websites
Math
Books
- A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics - Jeremy Kun - I’ve read through 3/4 (8/10? Something like that) of this book. I’ve also done none of the exercises (my kingdom for an answer key!). A very nice read, in particular I really enjoyed the derivation of the wave equation and the general conversational tone of the book. Very reassuring to hear that yes learning new math is supposed to be slow.
- Linear and Geometric Algebra - Dr. Alan Macdonald - I struggled in my first Linear Algebra course and just scraped through. I read most of this book over the course of a summer. I took my time and would work through the exercises as described, and for the first time, things like a basis and span and all these technical definitions really started to click! I keep meaning to finish the book and work through the second volume on vector and geometric calculus.
- Quick Calculus - Daniel Kleppner and Norman Ramsey - I worked through this calculus book the summer after graduating from SAIT based on a recommendation in the Art of Electronics. Very well done and a nice review.
- Calculus Made Easy - Silvanus P. Thompson - One of the best teaching books I’ve ever read. I worked through the whole book in the fall of 2017, it was a wonderful review and provided some of the best intuitive ways of thinking about the integral and derivative as a beginner. If you want to refresh your calculus or learn it for the first time, there is no better book.
- Logicomix - Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou - This is a nice, but historically inaccurate (it’s still very good!), overview of the advances in logic that took place between Bertrand Russell and Kurt Godel in the early part of the 20th century. If you want a layman’s introduction to the whole debate it’s hard to do better. Find out what his incompleteness theorem is in general terms!
- A History of Pi - Petr Beckmann - The author has since veered off in to conspiratorial waters but this book is a wonderful history of how humanity has gotten better at calculating pi. Mathematics is the technology of thought and so advancement in computation in some vague sense also represents progress in mathematical technology.
- e The Story of a Number - Eli Maor - e is this weird constant that pops up when you’re learning calculus. I didn’t get why it was the way it was, or it’s relation to logarithms and exponentials. So I read this book which is filled with lots of context about how these concepts came to be. Very much worth reading for the the historical detail alone. The math wasn’t too bad at all and I found it really enlightening.
- Who is Fourier? - Transnational College of Lex - I think along with Calculus Made Easy this book deserves a real spot on the shelf of anyone who wants to know how to write an easily understandable mathematics text. Written in a conversational form, by a group of people documenting their investigation of the Fourier transform the book covers both discrete and continuous cases and also for good measure has a fantastic explantion of the fast fourier transform.
- Birth of a Theorem - Cedric Villani - How does a top flight research mathematician (he won a fields medal) pursue research? Well here’s a memoir straight from the horse’s mouth. He discusses how he does his research, it’s collaborative, and sometimes he lies on the floor of his office to clear his mind. I enjoyed reading it.
- How to Study for a Mathematics Degree - Dr. Lara Alcock - This was a very reassuring book for me to read. I think math is often very intimidating and confusing, and this guide helped minimize a lot of that intimidation for me. It’s especially useful for when you’re trying to crack into harder maths papers, she explains lots of the cultural context of math.
- A Mind for Numbers - Dr. Barbara Oakley - This book is sort of a current summary of the best research about how to learn. Lots of info about chunking, how to focus (love the Pomodoro technique!) and tons of other great tidbits. Super handy for any student.
- Blackjack Play like the Pros - John Bukofsky - Card counting is really interesting, it’s not as lucrative as it used to be, because Casinos can do math too and have figured out how to reduce the edge. It can still be profitable though, if you have the willingness to practice it enough to get an edge. I don’t, but reading through this book and playing with some cards sure taught me a lot about the practical application of probability to the real world.
- The Collapse of Chaos - Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart - Very often people ask how Chaos occurs, but this flips the question, how does stability appear out of chaos? Very nice read and a good popular math book.
- Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach - H. Jerome Keisler - A wonderful overview of calculus from a non-standard approach. I read through the whole thing and took notes on what was new to me (which was a lot!). Lovely to find that the intuition of infinitesimals can be placed on a sound and rigorous footing.
- A Beginner’s Guide to Differential Forms - Peter Collier - Getting to grips with new math is always tough, and you want the simplest entry point. There are things that are obvious to those who have studied it and because it’s the water they swim in they gloss over those details when discussing it. This is a great starting point for learning differential forms and I found it fascinating to read through.
- Dynamics The Geometry of Behaviour Part One: Periodic Behaviour - Ralph Abraham and Christopher Shaw - Just a fantastic bit of visual work with math. Very helpful for knitting together a more comprehensive perspective on a lot of the formulae I’ve been looking at.
- Huygens and Barrow Newton and Hooke - V.I. Arnold - By one of the greats, need to re-read, but a very good polemic on how math is done and the context of its development.
Papers
- Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Learned Before Teaching Differential Equations - Gian Carlo Rota - A classic essay on what is important to teach in ODE’s and what isn’t. Very nice for a bit more context around math.
- A Revolution in Mathematics? What Really Happened a Century Ago - Frank Quinn -
- Classical Roots of Knot Theory - Jozef H Przytycki -
- What are the most important statistical ideas of the past 50 years - Andrew Gelman and Aki Vehtari - A bit beyond me tbh, but a nice overview, maybe a couple touchpoints for remembering.
- Geometric Algebra Primer - Jaap Suter - This is a really concise introduction to geometric algebra. If you’re looking to get an overview of the mathematical mechanics involved and how all the bits fit together I think this is the place to sart.
- A History of Vector Analysis - Michael J Crowe -
- Imaginary Numbers are Not Real - Stephen Gull, Anthony Lasenby, Chris Doran -
- The Markov Chain Monte Carlo Revolution - Persi Diaconis -
- Off to Infinity in Finite Time - Donald G Saari and Zhihong Xia - The insights in this paper, that there are solutions to the n-body problem where particles go off to infinity in finite time is a teensy bit important if you are trying to model a large number of charged particles to gain insight into their behaviour. It dovetails nicely with a John Carlos Baez series about continuinty in mathematics.
- Knot Theory’s Odd Origins - Daniel S. Silver -
- Knot Theory for 8 Year Olds - Dan Ghica -
- Some elements for a history of the dynamical systems theory - Multiple Contributors - I always like reading overviews of fields since they provide a ton of context that I as an outsider miss. Lots of little tidbits in this one, for example I found out about the Chirikov Criterion here!
- On Proof and Progress in Mathematics - William P. Thurston - A lovely essay on what understanding and the transmission of knowledge across mathematical generations means. How much is lost when someone dies, very interesting to read in conjunction with The Forgotten Revolution.
- The Combinatorial Revolution in Knot Theory- Dr Sam Nelson- A wonderful paper explaining how the application of combinatorial techniques to patterns in knot theory led to the discovery of whole new classes of knots. Really neat to get some more context about the whole thing!
- Computer experiments and visualization in mathematics and physics. A subjective short walk among some historical examples -J.R. Chazottes and M. Monticelli- This was a wonderful overview of the impact on computer visualisation and mathematical developments. Some things I knew, others I didn’t, like the development of elliptic curves and Burch and Swinnerton-Dyer’s conjecture. While I knew about Ulam, Teller, Pasta and Fermi’s investigation of non-linearities I did not realize that further investigation in the 70’s of their problem using computers had led to the modern theory of solitons.
- The Development of Fractional Calculus 1695-1900 - Bertram Ross - Heaviside used a fractional derivative when calculating one of his solutions for his Operational Calculus. There’s a lot more to the technique though and this paper clarifies how it came to be.
- Gauss and the History of the Fast Fourier Transform - Multiple authors - Gauss had the FFT in 1805.
- An Illustrated Introduction to the Ricci Flow - Gabriel Khan - A great intro/overview to the technique used to prove the Poincare Conjecture
- Heaviside’s Operational Calculus and the Attempts to Rigorise It - Jesper Lutzen - Lots of fascinating context for how the Laplace Transforms I learned as part of my EE training developed into their modern form.
- Some Thoughts on Automation and Mathematical Research - Akshay Venkatesh - Maybe the first thing I’ve read that tries to grapple with the status of research problems and whether or not high status problems are good ones to attack.
- A pictorial introduction to differential geometry, leading to Maxwell’s equations as three pictures.- Dr Jonathan Gratus - I have all the time in the world for clear explanations of mathematical concepts. This is a lovely bit of exposition on differential geometry and manifolds.
- Theology and its Discontents: The Origin Myth of Modern Mathematics - Colin Mclarty - A bit of inside baseball, but still an interesting read about the great Hilbert and how his supervisor helped play a role in developing the current style of modern mathematics.
- Dyamical Systems (Including Chaos) - Cosma Rohilla Shalizi - A nice summary of what one person thinks about dynamical systems and a list of good resources to investigate further.
- The Helmholtz-Hodge Decomposition – A Survey - Bhatia et al. - Overview of a very neat technique, a good starting point. I only skimmed the math section but the applications really points you to some good stuff.
- The Decompositional Approach to Matrix Computation - G.W. Stewart - This gives an overview of the big six matrix factorizations in use in numerical linear algebra, and hints at how math was changed by the application and utility of the computer to matrix decomposition.
- An Editor Recalls Some Hopeless Papers - Wilfrid Hodges - Lots of mistakes made by people are very similar, here people often try to disprove things they don’t understand, how do they mess up?
- Talking About Large Language Models- Murray Shanahan - I found this deeply compelling when I read it in December 2022, I do not find it so compelling a few months later after the release of Bing chat.
- Computer-Made Perspective Movies as a Scientific and Communication Tool- E E Zajac - One of the OG computer graphics papers out of Bell Labs. So short and easy to read, the math is very easy too. Want to know how to render an object from a vantage point? Here’s the simple formula!
- How Technology Has Changed What It Means to Think Mathematically - Keith Devlin - Great overview of how the development of tools of and for thought changed what was possible for humans.
- Safari au Pays des Fonctions Speciales - Jean Jacquelin - Great overview of special functions that aren’t really covered in a general engineering math education. Lots of things I hadn’t know existed and some I had, the author has kindly provided an english translation as well.
- Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs - Richard De Millo, Richard Lipton and Alan Perlis - Nominally about formal verification of programs, but really about how math is done.
- On Unsettleable Arithmetical Problems - John Conway - When can we prove a thing and when can we not? Implications for Collatz.
- Automatic Generation of Strange Attractors - J C Sprott - Great little paper about automating the search for interesting equations.
- Visualizing Knot Complements - Steve Trettel - A nice paper about the math behind rendering some strange knotless shapes.
- Computation and State Machines - Leslie Lamport - How to formalize a state machine with mathematics.
- Breakthrough in Conformal Mapping - James Case - Summary of an old breakthrough that let people solve some thorny conformal mapping cases.
- Geometry to Algebra and Back Again - Jack Rusher - Lovely overview of the development of numbers and geometry leading up to Geometric Algebra.
- A Short History of Operator Theory - Evans M. Harrell II - What it says in the title. Operators are a sort of mapping from one functional space to another.
- Math Augmentation: How Authors Enhance the Readability of
Formulas using Novel Visual Design Practices - Head, Xie and Hearst - Great paper that summarizes a bunch of ways to make mathematics easier to read and digest. Has an attached video that is good as well.
Courses
- Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos -Dr. Steven Strogatz - I found this series hugely helpful when I was working through the material in my Intermediate Ordinary Differential Equations course at UVic. I haven’t watched every single video, but I’ve been through most. The associated textbook is very good as well.
- The Fourier Transform and its Applications - Dr. Brad Osgood - I ran through all of these lectures in the summer of 2020 and took notes after they were recommended by Jeremy Kun in his book. They’re a great series and placed the Fourier Transform in context for me.
- Topology and Geometry - Dr. Tadashi Tokieda - A fantastic course and a very good introduction to Topology. Again, I watched all the videos and took notes. It familiarized me with the field and also provided tremendous insight in to what mathematics really is and how it operates. To quote Dr. Tokieda: “that’s what mathematics is, an analogy”.
- Differential Forms - Dr. Michael Penn - A great overview of differential forms that I completed in the spring of 2021. There’s some hints that more videos might be added in the future, but currently it was a great introduction to modern methods of expressing Maxwell’s Equations.
- Particle in Cell Fundamentals - - A great introduction to particle in cell simulations for plasmas. I was able to purchase the course as a student at a discount for $25. I took notes of all the videos and it was a great help for writing my own initial PIC simulation.
- Center Manifolds, Normal Forms and Bifurcations - Dr. Shane Ross - Have finished this series and really enjoyed it. Not too long (only 10 videos), and it filled in some gaps that weren’t possible to cover given time constraints in my intermediate ODE’s course. Lots of neat new things about manifolds and normal forms!
- Advanced Dynamics - Hamiltonian Systems and Nonlinear Dynamics - Dr. Shane Ross -
- Imaginary Numbers are Real - Welch Labs - Complex numbers appear everywhere in electrical engineering and since I didn’t feel especially confident with them after completing my SAIT diploma, I worked through this series of videos along with the associated workbook. A wonderful short tutorial on complex numbers that goes all the way up to advanced concepts and lets you dip your toe in to some fascinating mathematics.
Websites
- Lee Lady’s Mathematical Website - Dr. Lee Lady - A great website that provides a ton of context about learning math. In particular his descriptions of how he proved some of his theorems early on, and general commentary about how to teach and learn math is invaluable. His essay on “How to do Mathematical Research” is worth reading repeatedly.
- Reverse engineering Poincaré: What’s next? - Michael Harris - A neat little essay about automated reasoning and human intuition.
- Interactive Tutorial of the Sequent Calculus - Fantastic little tutorial of a logical system that’s like Hoare logic and is very useful for thinking about your code.
Videos
Engineering
Books
- Debugging - David Agans - This book is supposedly specific to programming, but it’s rules for debugging are applicable to all sorts of technical problems. Very nice quick and easy read and filled with practical advice.
- Ignition! - John Drury Clark - Once a problem field has been defined, say fuels for rocket engines, how does one go about finding all the possible fuels and categorizing them? Sometimes very crudely, and sometimes very elegantly. This is a great book about the practice of chemistry in the service of a tightly defined task and all the trials and tribulations that go along with that.
- To Engineer is Human - Henry Petroski - The body of knowledge engineer’s use to design structures and technology is very often written in the mistakes of past engineers. Lots of case studies and examinations of successes and failures.
- Invention by Design - Henry Petroski - Again a series of case studies, but specific to technological items. The current general paradigm seems to me to be that some scientists invent some new theory, and then it is applied by engineers. I don’t think that’s correct, I think theory has to be rooted in something physical or it sort of eats itself (see String Theory). Here some very pedestrian and not so pedestrian pieces of technology are investigated and the process that brought them to be is described.
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Richard Hamming - Stripe Press has been on a roll with it’s republishing of classic books. I need to re-read the mathematical sections on Hamming Encoding, but this book is fantastic. Lots of tips and encouragement about how to push forward and expand the frontiers of knowledge from someone who was able to do just that.
- Spacesuit - Nicholas de Monchaux - Words like bespoke and handcrafted seem inappropriate for things like the space program, but nothing could be further from the truth. Enter this fascinating, but academically written, monograph on the development of the spacesuit for the Apollo missions. Given the choice between a dedicated aerospace engineering firm and a company mostly known for making corsets and bras, who do you think would be better placed to make a spacesuit? The answer lies within this book!
- Accidental Engineer - Ray Holt w/ Leo Sorge - Perhaps this belongs in the biography section, but its a very short read, just under 80 pages. It details the inventor of the first real microprocessor Ray Holt. Fresh out of university, with a single course in the subject under his belt, he designed from scratch a flight computer for the magnificent F-14 Tomcat. Some of the techniques and ideas he used were still bleeding edge nearly 50 years later in 2010. Intel’s claims with calculator circuits pales in comparison. Really shows you what people can do when they hold themselves to a high standard.
- The Hardware Hacker - Bunnie Huang - So you want to make an electronic doodad yourself but don’t have a good idea of the process? Read this book, it covers everything, prototyping, BOM’s, talking to factories, test jigs. It’s all here.
- The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder - Such a great story about how a computer was built and the work that goes into engineering complex machines. Love the anecdote about the mushroom theory of management.
- The New New Thing- Michael Lewis - Lovely story about the founding of Netscape, Silicon Valley and Jim Gray.
- The Cuckoo’s Egg- Cliff Stoll - Just a first rate story, and a wonderful tale about persistence and pursuing weird things. Loved it.
- How We Invented the Airplane: An Illustrated History-Orville Wright- Worth it for the pictures alone. But a first person account of how they created the miracle of powered flight.
- The Collins Class Submarine Story - Peter Yule and Derek Woolner - Australia built some enormous diesel submarines in the 90s having never done so before. How did these Swedish Fish adapt to their new southern home and what problems came about while building these monstrously complicated machines? Great read!
- Every Engineer Should Know This - Dr. R. Andrew Motes - Fun quick read with some lovely anecdotes about teaching rocket design.
Interviews
- Jim Keller: Moore’s Law - Lex Friedman’s Podcast - Microprocessors and silicon ciruits are one of the few places where the pace of technological change has been quite steady. I’m not confident that that’s a model that is generalizable to lots of other arenas, but it brings with it a whole host of challenges. Jim Keller has been at the centre of this change in microprocessor’s since the 1980’s so he’s been able to see the field change for a long time, and has driven quite a bit of that change himself. This interview with Lex Friedman is just filled with tons of interesting information.
Articles
Finance
The inclusion of finance might seem a little curious, but I think it’s a hugely important place to read about invention and in particular the application and misapplication of mathematical models to reality. I would also note that I think a lot of very talented people have sniffed out the rot in modern Academia (from the 70’s on), and Wall St. has long been willing to pay people a lot of money for their talents. It’s always worthwhile to read smart people, and so you put two and two together and you end up here.
Books
- Safe Haven Investing for Financial Storms- Mark Spitznagel - I liked it, a very nice explanation of how a specific class of insurance strategy can increase your overall returns in investing. There’s a couple key things to make sure that that statement holds, but this is a lovely overview of how it all works. Well worth a read.
- My Life as a Quant - Emanuel Derman - A biography of a mathematical modeller originally from South Africa who came to finance by way of physics. Its generally interesting but also provides some specific colour about how and why Wall St really mathematized from the 70’s onwards.
- When Genius Failed - Roger Lowenstein - Classic case study of a mismatch between a mathematical trading model and reality. It very nearly broke the markets in 1998, and foreshadows a lot of the problems that happened later on in 2008. Very much worth reading.
- Models Behaving Badly - Emanuel Derman - A wonderful polemic about how people should use math to model things and how they should not. The author has spent a lot of time thinking about these things and it shows. Very much worth reading for people who are interested in how science can go wrong. I would be curious to know Dr. Derman’s thoughts on Sabine Hossenfelder’s most recent book, Lost in Math.
- Unknown Market Wizards - Jack D Schwager - Is it possible to beat the market? Yes, but you’re probably not going to do it. Here is a series of interviews with individual traders who have a long track record of continued success. I think there are a lot of lessons for people who want to find success in science here. You’re trying to extract a signal from an incredibly noisy environment in science, a similar dynamic is underway with market traders. How do they succeed?
- Fooled by Randomness - Nicholas Nassim Taleb - His best book.
- The Black Swan - Nicholas Nassim Taleb - His second best book.
- Antifragile - Nicholas Nassim Taleb - His third best book.
- The Poker Face of Wall St. - Aaron Brown - I really liked this book, lots of ways of looking at risk in investing through the frame of successful gamblers. A very neat historical fact was teased regarding the Yukon gold rush, poker there was some sort of local pool of winnings that allowed a member of the poker players group to make enough to actually leave. You couldn’t play at the table unless you’d put your time in looking for gold. Super neat local credit structure.
- A Man for All Markets - Dr. Edward Thorpe - A wonderful tale about a very smart man’s successful career
- Lying for Money - Dan Davies - Long firms, control frauds, cooking oil, deception, deceit, Barclays, it’s all here. Fun and easy to read.
Physics
Videos
Interviews
- The Portal - Roger Penrose - I normally try and listen to podcasts that are in the interviewer’s area of expertise since they tend to be most interesting (Joe Rogan on fighting and comedy for example, less so on other stuff), and this is one of the few interviews with a mathematical physicist that didn’t drive me absolutely bananas. Wonderful to listen to a Nobel prize winner discuss mathematics on a level that isn’t just for the layman, very enlightening even if I couldn’t follow a lot of it.
Books
Papers
Websites
- Scott Locklin’s Blog - Dr. Scott Locklin - I can’t remember when I stumbled on this blog, but I read it every time something new goes up. Lots of different things, always a unique viewpoint and points are made in the best, most brutal fashion. I’ve been introduced to a lot of new ideas via the blog, one of my favourite posts is the following on chaos and the Ford paradox.
- Fusor.net - I’ve mentioned this elsewhere but in particular I’d like to highlight some of the threads on the history of the fusor. These are first hand interviews Richard Hull undertook with many of the original fusor team at ITT. There’s just no other way to hear about this stuff since many of them have since passed on. Absolutely worth reading.
- The Herbert Dingle Affair - How do you know what is true? Surely science filters the wheat from the chaff and lets you triangulate what is correct?