Suggested Reading: Proof from THE BOOK

Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler — Proofs from THE BOOK — 3rd ed., Springer, 2004, 240 pp. ISBN 3-540-40460-0

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Paul Erdős always refered to proofs that were particularly elegant or powerful as proofs from The Book, a book with a transfinite number of pages, held by God (in which he didn’t believe), containing all the most beautiful proofs of all mathematical theorems.

Suggested Reading: Mathematical Cranks

Underwook Dudley — Mathematical Cranks — The American Mathematical Association, 1992, 372 pp. ISBN 0-88385-507-0

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Everyone using the Internet knows about cranks. A typical crank is an individual putting forth a defective theory, usually mathematical or physical in nature, but refusing to see his errors or understanding what he missed; despite well intentioned explanations from (real) experts on the topic. The crank insists with denial and eventually aggressivity.

Suggested Reading: Digital Landscape Photography

Michael Frye — Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters — Focal Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-240-81243-4

(Buy at Amazon.com)

(This is off-topic for this blog, but you may know that photography is one of my hobbies.)

Frye presents various techniques to create great landscape photography in a spirit inspired by the great masters, in particular Ansel Adams. He discusses many technical aspects, such as the zone system, but focusses on composition and on the ever elusive nature of light: is light too hard? is it soft? warm? Does the light produce the right constrasts? Are the shadows interesting? Are the bright regions in the right places?

Of course, most of the images used in the book are breathtaking!

Suggested Readings:Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach

John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson — Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach — 4^th ed., Morgan Kaufmann, , 704 pp. ISBN 0-12-370490-1

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Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach is probably the most up-to-date and comprehensive introductory text for computer architecture, covering a broad spectrum of topics from micro-instructions to multi-core parallelism. This book is different—from the aging Advanced Computer Architecture: Parallelism, Scalability, Programmability by Kai Hwang (1992, now out of print) for example—in that it takes a quantitative approach, motivating most statements by hard numbers, simulations and benchmarks.

Suggested Reading: Patterns for Parallel Programming

Timothy G. Mattson, Beverly A. Sanders, Berna L. Massingill — Patterns for Parallel Programming — Addison-Wesley, 2005, 356 pp. ISBN 0-321-22811-1

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If the Gang of Four changed the way we discuss about software design by introducing a catalogue of basic software patterns, this books vies to extend it to parallel patterns. But let us be clear, it’s not a book about parallel algorithms; no, it discusses parallelism in very general terms and present the few prototypical application types and how they can be efficiently broken down by data structure, command flow, and synchronisation, while remaining rather high level.

Suggested Reading: Mrs. Perkins’s Electric Quilt

Paul J. Nahin — Mrs. Perkins’s Electric Quilt: And Other Intriguing Stories of Mathematical Physics — Princeton University Press, 2009, 391 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-13540-3

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In this book, you will discover the topic of mathematical physics—or physics mathematics, depending on how you look at it—through a series of counter-intuitive results (counter-intuitive for the non-physicist, that is). The author shows that with logic and (quite) a bit of mathematics, you can obtain surprising but correct results. A good part of the book rotates around the topic of gravity (boom, tss.) but also presents other topics such as air drag, partitionning squares into squares optimally, infinite resistor networks, and random walks. The narrative style is clear and simple; and while the mathematics in the book may seems scary at first, you still get the point; someone with just a little background in mathematics will still get the essential; someone with a better background in mathematics will get the best of it.

Another worthwhile note is that the typography of mathematical equations is simply exquisite; it is very well typeset. Something that is getting rare these days for a grand public book.

Suggested Reading: Les sciences de l’imprécis

Abraham A. Moles — Les sciences de l’imprécis — Seuil, 1990, 310 pp. ISBN 2-02-011620-0

(out of print?)

“Thinking about the vague is not vague thinking” would quite succinctly and accurately describe Moles’ thesis. The terminology used will be a bit disconcerting to the computer scientist as the vocabulary comes from the social sciences rather than the “hard” sciences. At times we feel that analogies drawn between the author’s ideas and information theory (and computer science) are almost stretched but we can quite forgive this since it nevertheless remains a very clear exposition of his thesis, that is, imprecision is not to be frown upon and is quite necessary to science and as such should be mastered rather than feared.

The text is almost grand public as it contains essential no maths.

Suggested Reading: The Common Sense of Science

Jacob Bronowski — The Common Sense of Science — Harvard University Press, 1978, 154 pp. ISBN 0-674-14651-4

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I already knew Bronowski by the television series The Ascent of Man (broadcasted in french in the late 70s or maybe the very early 80s by Radio-Québec, now TéléQuébec). Even as a child, I was impressed by the depth of discourse of the series. Universal thinker, in The Common Sense of Science, Bronowski tells us how he conceives science and its methods as a fundamental human activity, and why it plays such an important (if misunderstood) rôle in our society. The narration follows more or less the evolution of science since the Enlightenment to our time and how it is tied to the industrial revolution.

Suggested Reading: Prisoners Dilema

William Poundstone — Prionner’s Dilema — Anchor, 1993, 294 pp. ISBN 978-0385415804

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This book isn’t really an introduction to game theory, nor a von Neuman biography, nor a history lesson on the cold war era. Most of the book is devoted to either the cold war logic or to game theory, and little to von Neumann who, really, only serves as the main thread bringing game theory and the cold war together. Nevertheless, it’s a quite cromulent introduction, while not very math-oriented, to the fundamentals of game theory where two (or more) players are confronted and try to maximize their gain. Can or should player cooperate? If so, why?

If, like me, you think that the cold war is rather boring, just skip those part, it will still be a quite interesting read.

Suggested Reading:Unix Systems for Modern Architectures

Curt Schimmel — Unix Systems for Modern Architectures: Symmetric Multiprocessing and Caching for Kernel Programmers — Addison-Wesley, 1994, 396 pp. ISBN 0-201-6338-8

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Schimmel proposes an introduction to cache hierarchies and their different technologies and the problems and complexities they incur for an operating system. The book starts off by presenting and comparing the various cache architectures—physical vs virtual caches, mostly. Another part is dedicated to the various locks and exclusion mechanisms such as spin locks, semaphores, etc., that may be found in Unix-type systems. He finishes with cache consistency problems for multiprocessors.