May 22, 2019

popular science and math books

By Laura Albert

Nearly five years ago I wrote a post about mathy popular science books, where I recommended the following books:

  1. In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman by Bill Cook (An outstanding book about operations research. Read my post here)
  2. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt (read my post here)
  3. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
  4. Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games are Won by Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim
  5. How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg
  6. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t by Nate Silver

I have been continuing to read popular science and math books. Here are the ones I’ve liked since my last post on this topic.

  1. Who Gets What and Why: by Al Roth (another outstanding book about operations research).
  2. Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. So good.
  3. Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths (I wrote a post about this)
  4. Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong–and What You Really Need to Know by Emily Oster.
  5. Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci
  6. The Sports Gene by David Epstein
  7. Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson
  8. Dataclysm by Christian Rudder
  9. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
  10. Nudge: by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

The books on my reading list for this summer include:

  1. Infinite powers: how calculus reveals the secrets of the universe by Steven Strogatz
  2. Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football by John Urschel
  3. Cribsheet by Emily Oster (Finally a book about data-driven parenting!)

What else should I read?

https://twitter.com/lauraalbertphd/status/1130901207550189569
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019 at 8:22 am and posted in Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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