Category: Uncategorized

Already, criticism has be thrown at me for deciding to focus on pure mathematics. I am often told (with the best intentions) that I should go back to doing applied math/engineering.  I’m guessing that other people who’ve decided to study theoretical subjects suffer from a similar lack of respect.

Hopefully, this post will be helpful for you, my friends. Perhaps, to send to your families, engineers, etc. to save you time when you are sick of answering the same questions — laced with misunderstanding. Perhaps, to find consolation and recognize that you are not alone.

This post (admittedly written with the muses of frustration and maths evangelism) can be generalized to theoretical endeavors of any flavor. 

Why do you want to study theoretical science/math?

Why do I want to study pure math? The same reason that the scientist is providing above.

There is an itch in minds of the analytic and aesthetically inclined that mathematics scratches like no other.

I encourage you to read A Mathematician’s Apology and What is it Like to Understand Advanced Mathematics?.

What if you aren’t good at math?

It doesn’t matter if you’re good at mathematics or not if you enjoy doing it and have people willing to help you learn.

You’ve picked something that you enjoy doing, and you’re rolling with it.
Thereafter, if you do it for long enough, you’ll become good at it.

Don’t you want to help people?

Because of its abstractness, mathematics is universal in a sense that other fields of human thought are not. It finds useful applications in business, industry, music, historical scholarship, politics, sports, medicine, agriculture, engineering, and the social and natural sciences. The relationship between mathematics and the other fields of basic and applied science is especially strong.

– Source

Here’s an exploration of Which Mathematical Ideas Have Done The Most To Change History?.

How can math make you a better person?

Math provides you with powerful intuitions that can improve your daily life:

0. Maths develops the logical mindset, assiduous and aesthetic values needed to implement regular concise conversation and clear explanation. It teaches us to not accept hand-wavey proofs, but to derive them ourselves from first principles.

1. The ability to analyze a problem as a structure, work it out step by step and solve it generally translates between fields, allowing one trained in maths to easily move to other puzzle-based disciplines. For example, a maths person can transfer their skillset to computer programming by seeing code and programming languages as a collection of structures and rules governing their interactions.

2. An understanding of maths allows us to appreciate our environment by observing patterns and connections between objects that we wouldn’t otherwise see. After studying a field such as Model Theory, you begin to see deep connections (across fields of study) in the abstractions of seemingly unrelated concepts. Limiting yourself to the current ideas of one discipline makes original research unnecessarily difficult. I find that most original research is really just connecting past ideas into a new idea that is more than the sum of its parts.

3. Some visually oriented mathematicians overlay representations of abstract concepts on their environments as they go about daily life. This visual overlay of abstract stimuli increases the ability to appreciate things in their own right and builds visual intuition. However, overlaying mathematics on life differs significantly from making a mathematical model of your surroundings: the latter is far more concrete. Overlaying connections on stochastic stimuli is an enrichment to perception, whereas modeling stimuli is separate from it.

Visual intuition is important for research on the leading edge of science and mathematics (especially in geometry). Formalisms come after a topic is well understood.

4. The ability to describe mental pictures in a generalized symbolic fashion is incredibly powerful. The symbolic language of mathematics allows us to represent concepts generally without extraneous information, which permits each viewer to perceive the equations according to which mode of translation best suits their thought processes.

At this point, I’ll cease indulging my evangelism and go back my studies. 

This is a recording of all the books I’ve read, categorized by month, beginning 2/12. (I have forgotten most in-text books, as I created this list starting 1/13 – using Audible’s Library.)

! = Favourite/Recommend
* = Audiobook
~ = Indicates Incompletion
# = Non-fiction

I forget in which month I read these:
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes !!
Brave New World
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Holes – Sachar
Boy – Roald Dahl
BFG – Dahl
The Twits – Dahl
The Witches – Dahl
The Complete Adventures of Charlie and Mr. Willy Wonka – Dahl
Fantastic Mr. Fox – Dahl
Matilda – Dahl !
Bunnicula: Howliday Inn – Howe
The Celery Stalks at Midnight – “”
Nighty Nightmare – “”
Return to Howliday Inn – “”
Bunnicula Strikes Again – “”
Bunnicula Meets Edgar Allan Crow – “”
Goosebumps Series
Madeline
Catwings – Ursula K. Le Guin
Maximum Ride
A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle
The House of the Scorpion
Crispin – Avi
The Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning – Lemony Snicket
The Reptile Room – Snicket
The Wide Window – Snicket
The Miserable Mill – Snicket
The Austere Academy – “”
The Ersatz Elevator – “”
The Vile Village – “”
The Hostile Hospital – “”
The Carnivorous Carnival – “”
The Slippery Slope – “”
The Grim Grotto – “”
The Penultimate Peril – “”
The End – “”
The Hobbit
Ella Enchanted
Sophie’s Choice
Walk Two Moons
LOTR !!
Dune – Herbert!
Dune Messiah – “”
Children of Dune – “” ~
Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Shadow Series – Orson Scott Card
Redwall Series – Brian Jacques
Twilight Series
Uglies Series
The Chosen
Stargirl #1
Eragon Series – Paolini
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference – Gladwell
Outsiders
Artemis Fowl #1
Three Junes
The Tale of Despereaux
Moloka’i – Brennett
13 Reasons Why – Asther
Catcher in the Rye
His Dark Materials Series – Pullman  !
DaVinci Code – Brown
Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles – Will Clarke !
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman  ! #
The Chronicles of Narnia  !
The Particle Garden – Kane #
Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kid
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Inkheart – Cornelia Funke
Angels and Demons – Dan Brown
Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism – Klein #
Flatland !!
Finite and Infinite Games !!

02/12
* Ready Player One – Cline  !
Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card  !
Hunger Games Trilogy
div grad curl and all that – schey  !#
The Lightning Thief – Rick Riordan
Sea of Monsters – Riordan
Titan’s Curse – Riordan
The Battle of the Labyrinth – Riordan
The Last Olympian – Riordian

03/12
Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension – Rucker   !#
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the night time – Haddon !!
* The Diamond Age – Stephenson
* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Adams !
* Life, the Universe, and Everything – Adams
* The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

04/12
* Snow Crash – Stephenson !
* Reamde – Stephenson !
* Ghost in the Wires – Mitnick #
* The Elegant Universe – Greene
* The Hidden Reality – Greene
* Thinking Fast & Slow – Kahnmen #
* The Accidental Time Machine – Halderman
* The Forever War – Halderman
* The Blind Watchmaker – Dawkins
* The Magic of Reality – Dawkins  !
* The Fault in Our Stars – Green  !

05/12
* Euclid’s Window – Mlodinow #
* The Mystery of Aleph – Aczel #
* The Man Who Mistook his wife for a hat – Sacks #
* The Other Brain – Fields #
* How to Win Friends and Influence People – Carnegie  !#
* What Einstein told his Barber – Wolke #
* What EveryBODY is saying – Navarro  (Watch the feet) #
* The Information – Gleick #
* iWoz #

06/12
* Science Matters – Trefil, Hazen   !#
* The Nerdist Way – Hardwick  !#
* The Selfish Gene – Dawkins  #
* A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bryson #
* A Universe from Nothing – Krauss #
* Sync – Strogatz  !#
* Chaos – Gleick #
* Linked – Barabasi #
* Click – Brafman #
* Predictably Irrational – Ariely #
Applied Chaos Theory – Campbell  !#

07/12
* The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins #
* German Phase 1 #
* Quiet – Susan Cain #
* From Eternity to Here – Carroll  #
* Entanglement – Amir Aczel #
* Red Storm Rising – Tom Clancy
* Fouling Houdini- Alex Stone #
1984 – George Orwell   !
Animal Farm – George Orwell  !
* You Are Not So Smart – McRaney  !#
* The Grand Design – Hawking #

08/12
* Stiff – Mary Roach #
* Wired for War – Singer !#
* Absolutely Small – Fayer #
* God is Not One – Prothero  !!#
* Arguably – Christopher Hitchens
* Clear and Present Danger – Clancy
* Quicksilver – Stephenson
* King of the Vagabonds – Stephenson
* Why Evolution is True – Coyne #
* The Illiad & the Odyssey – Homer
* War and Peace – Tolstoy
* The Physics of Star Trek – Krauss
* Particle Physics – Close #
* Superconductivity – Close #
How To Survive a Robot Uprising – Wilson #

09/12
* Farenheit 451 – Bradburry !
* The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
* Altered Carbon – Morgan
* In Cold Blood – Capote
* Slaughterhouse 5 – Vonnegut
* Catch-22 – Heller
* The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Larsson
* Middlesex – Eugenides
* Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World – Weatherford #
* Unwind – Shusterman
* Looking for Alaska – Green
* An Abundance of Katherines – Green
* Chinese Philosophy – Sartwell #
* Nonsense on Stilts – Pigilucci #
* Analects of Confucius  !#
* Neuromancer – Gibson

10/12
* On the Origin of Species #
* Accidental Genius – Levy #
* The Moral Animal – Wright #
* Don’t Know Much About the Bible – Davis #
* The Holy Qur’an – Noorbox Productions
* Anne Frank’s Diary – Anne Frank  #
* The Language Instinct – Pinker #
Mechanics: Berkeley Physics Course Volume 1 – Astron.  !#

11/12
* The Signal and the Noise – Silver #
* Make Yourself Unforgettable – Carnegie  #
* Turings Cathedral – Dyson #
* Shop Class as Soulcraft – Crawford  !#

12/12
* The Magicians – Grossman !
* The Magician King – Grossman
* The Wisdom of Psychopaths – Dutton
* Fifty Shades of Grey – E L James
* Antifragile – Taleb #
* Salmon of Doubt – Douglas Adams
The Lord of the Rings – Gollum – Andy Serkis #

01/13
Quantenmechanik – von Nuemann !!#
* Will Grayson Will Grayson – Green
* Touching the Void – Simpson
* Because I Said So – Ken Jennings
* Unbearable Lightness of Being – Kundera
* Papertowns – Green
* The Graveyard Book – Gaiman
* What Einstein Didn’t Know – Wolke #
* The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Covey #
* Brain Rules – John Medina #

02/13
* The 48 Laws of Power – Robert Greene #
* Warm Bodies – Isaac Marlon
* Mastery – Robert Greene  #
* The Emperor of all Maladies – Sidharta Mukherjee !#
* The Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin
* The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern  !

3/13
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction
SF Hall of Fame
The Fortress of Solitude – Lethern
Coraline – Neil Gaiman !

04/13
* The Host – Stephanie Meyer
The Phantom Tollbooth (in Grade -2 Braille)  !
* A Reason to Believe – Diana Copland
* The Killer Wore Leather – Laura Antoniou
* Killing Floor – Lee Child
* One Shot – Lee Child
* The Hard Way – Lee Child
* Persuader – Lee Child

05/13
* Calculating God – Sawyer !!
* Bad Luck and Trouble – Lee Child
* Without Fail – Lee Child
* Illuminatus  Part I: The Eye in the Pyramid
* Illuminatus  Part II: The Golden Apple
* Salt Sugar Fat – Micheal Moss #
* Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Riggs
* Life of Pi – Martel !
* Worth Dying For – Lee Child
* Fish & Chips – Madeline Urban & Abigail Roux
* Sticks & Stones – Madeline Urban & Abigail Roux
* Divide & Conquer – Madeline Urban & Abigail Roux
* Cut & Run  – Madeline Urban & Abigail Roux
* Fair Game – Lanyon
* The Stolen Luck – Reppert
* Divergent – Roth
* Shades of Gray – Brooke McKinley
Henri, le Chat Noir – Braden (Short Picture Book)  !
The Epic of Gilgamesh #

06/13
* Insurgent – Roth
* Legend – Marie Lu
* Prodigy – Marie Lu
* Escape Velocity – Crowe & Fox
* The Art of Thinking Clearly – Dobelli #
* Turn Back Time – Radclyffe
* Hostage Moon – Suede
* The Drunkard’s Walk – Leonard Mlodinow #
* The Science of Fear – Gardner #
The Prince –  Machiavelli
(Paper) The Precision Expandable Radar Calibration Sphere (PERCS)
With Applications for Laser Imaging and Ranging

07/13
(Paper) Topological Structure of Stable Plasma Flows – Cantarella
Mathematics for Physics – Woolfson & Woolfson  !#
Logical Chess: Move by Move – Chernev #
Concepts of Modern Mathematics – Stewart !!#

08/13
(Paper) Mechanical Principles of Wheelchair Design – Winter & Hotchkiss
(Paper) Mechanical advantage in wheelchair level propulsion: Effect on physical strain and efficiency – Lucas, et al.
(Paper) Design of Mechatronic Wheelchair (Power Module) – Kakoty, et al.
(Paper) Dual-Purpose Wheelchair Mechanism Designs – Hsu, et al.

10/13
Road to Reality – Roger Penrose  !!#
Gödel, Escher, Bach – Hofstadter  !#
(Paper) Soft Robotics for Chemists – Ilievski, et al.
(Paper) Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom – Braun

11/13
Permutation City – Greg Egan  !
Mozart and the Whale – Jerry Newport  !
(Short Story) Microcosmic God  !
(Short Story) The Cold Equations  !!

12/13
(Paper) Simultaneous localization and mapping with the AR.Drone – Dijkshoorn
Introduction to Topology – Mendelson !#
(Paper) The 3x + 1 Problem: An Overview – Jeffrey C. Lagarias  !#

01/14
Number Theory – Andrews #~
Fourier Series – Tolstov
Applied Optimal Estimation – Gelb #
On Numbers and Games – Conway #
* Love and Math – Frenkel  !#
(Paper) Integrated information theory of consciousness:
an updated account – Tononi  !#
A Mathematician’s Apology – Hardy  !#
The Singularity is Near – Kursweil #
(Paper) Subepidermal moisture predicts erythema and stage 1 pressure ulcers in nursing home residents: a pilot study – Alessi, et al.
(Paper) Introducing a new incontinence management system for nursing home residents – Alessi, et al.

02/14
* Anathem – Stephenson ~
The Man Who Knew Infinity – Robert Kanigel #
Magical Mathematics – Persi Diaconis & Ron Graham ~#
(Paper) Pressure Ulcer Prevention and Management
(Paper) Object recognition for an autonomous wheelchair
equipped with a RGB-D camera
(Paper) Lattice actions, 3-manifolds, and homology – Farb and Shalen

03/14
* The Innovator’s Dilemma – Clay Christensen #
* Seeing Voices – Oliver Sacks #
* The Moral Landscape – Sam Harris #
(Paper) Patterns of deficits in daily functioning and cognitive performance of patients with Alzheimer disease – Alessi, et al.
(Paper) Predicting caregiver burden from daily functional abilities of patients with mild dementia – Alessi, et al.
Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think – Kotler, Diamandis #

04/14:
* The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Thomas Kuhn #
The Ethical Slut – Hardy & Easton # !
(Paper) Blind Signal Separation of Similar Pitches and Instruments in a Noisy Polyphonic Domain
(Paper) Factorial Scaled Hidden Markov Model for Polyphonic Audio Representation and Source Separation
This Explains Everything – John Brockman #
(Paper) PHENIX: a comprehensive Python-based system formacromolecular structure solution -Afonine, et al.
Against Intellectual Property – Levine & Boldrin #
*Ignore Everybody:  and 39 Other Keys to Creativity – Hugh MacLeod #

05/14:

06/14
A Field Guide to Genetic Programming #
A Combinatorial Introduction to Topology – Henle #!
Neuroprosthetics: Theory and Practice (Series on Bioengineering & Biomedical Engineering – Vol. 2) – Horch & Gurpreet #

07/14

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius #
Algebraic Topology – Hatcher #

?? Lost track

11/14

HPMOR (up to latest update, the writing is unfinished)
Tesla’s Autobiography
The Body in Pain
Tiny Beautiful Things

?? Lost track

5/14:

Worm !

6/14:

*The Martian !

(Lost Track)

11/15:
* Seveneves
(Lost Track)

1/16:

* The Canticle of Leibowitz !
* Joy in the Morning — Woodehouse
From Cardano’s Great Art to Lagrange’s Reflections
Sonya Kovalevskya’s Recollections of Childhood !!
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory !!
Sarafina and the Black Cloak !!

2/16:
* Wild !!
* Eggs, beans, and crumpets — Woodehouse
* The Boy who lost Fairyland — Valente !
* All the Birds in the Sky !
* Der Name des Windes (Die Königsmörder-Chronik 1) ~
Bloodchild and other stories — Butler
Squirrel seeks Chipmunk — Sedaris

3/16:
* Find Her !
Samedi the Deafness !!
Sonya Kovelevskya’s Mathematics — Cooke ~
Madonnas of Leningrad ~
The Bell Jar ~

4/16:
Lost track

5/16:
* The Raven Cycle: Books I, II, III, and IV !
* How to be a Normal Person — TJ Kline
* The Grimnoir Chronicles: Hard Magic, Spellbound, Warbound (these are amazing, I highly recommend them) !!
* The Dresden Files: Book I (didn’t like it)
* The Girl with all of the Gifts
* The Paper Magician Trilogy: The Paper Magician, the Glass Magician, and the Master Magician
* The Dinner — Herman Koch
* John Dies at the End — Wong

6/16:
This Book Is Full of Spiders Seriously Don’t Touch It — Wong
* American Gods — Gaiman
* The Name of the Wind — Rothfuss !
The Wise Man’s Fear — Rothfuss !
Little Orvie — Booth Tarkington
Rogues — George R. R. Martin, et. al.
Dangerous Women — George R. R. Martin, et. al ~
Seventeen — Booth Tarkington ~

7/16:
* Monster Hunter International — Corerria
* Ego is the Enemy — Holiday
* A Clash of Kings — George R. R. Martin
Un Lun Dun — Miéville ~
* In the Middle of Somewhere — Parrish
* Hidden Bodies — Kepnes
Philosophische Untersuchungen — Wittgenstein ~
* Duma Key — Stephen King

8/16:
* 1Q84 – Marukami
The Danish Girl
Far Afield !
The Fingersmith — Sarah Waters
* The Dispossesed — Ursula Le Guin
Ada, or Ador — Nabokov

9/16:

Ubik — Philip K. Dick
David Copperfield — Charles Dickens
Reread: Ethical Slut

10/16:

* The Illustrated Man — Ray Bradburry ~
The Demon Cycle: The Warded Man,
the Desert Spear,
the Daylight War,
the Skull Throne — Peter V. Brett
Sphinx —  Anne Garretta (English Translation by Emma Ramadan)

11/16:
Blood Meridian ~
* Kafka on the Shore — Murakami
Me Before You — Jojo Moyes
* The Story of my Teeth
Hyperion

12/16:
The Fall of Hyperion ~
* The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck — Manson

1/17:
* The Orphan Master’s Son — Adam Johnson
* A Man Called Ove — Fredik Backman  !

2/17:
* The Book of Joy — Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu
* Welcome to Nightvale — Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Granor
* The Lies of Lock Lamora — Lynch ~

3/17:
* This is Where it Ends — Nijkamp !
* Stoner — John Williams

4/17:

*The Spaceship next door — Gene Doucette
*Troubled Waters — Elemental Blessings
*Royal Airs — Elemental Blessings
*Jeweled Fire — Elemental Blessings
*The Weaver
*On Basilisk Station: Honor Harrington, Book 1
*Crosstalk

Planned Reading:

Fortune Smiles — Adam Johnson
Waiting for Godot
The Question of Bruno

To Reread: Structure of Scientific Revolutions

All our wrong todays
300 arguments
Grief is a thing with Feathers
The left hand of darkness

Castle in the mist
Lucifer’s hammer
The French lieutenants wife
Pnin
The house of the spirit
The Euthanist
The Troop
Imajica
The Spire
Schild’s Ladder
Transhuman
Pattern Recognition
Pinter’s A Book of Abstract Algebra
Proofs from THE BOOK
Carter’s Visual Group Theory

Visual Complex Analysis
The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy – Isaac Newton
What is Mathematics Really? – Reuben Hersh
Games of Life – Karl Sigmund
Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder (edited by) Rudy Rucker
House of Leaves – Danielewski
Maus (Graphic Novel)
I am a Strange Loop – Hofstadter