Nearly five years ago I wrote a post about mathy popular science books, where I recommended the following books:
- In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman by Bill Cook (An outstanding book about operations research. Read my post here)
- Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt (read my post here)
- Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
- Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games are Won by Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim
- How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg
- 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.
- Who Gets What and Why: by Al Roth (another outstanding book about operations research).
- Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. So good.
- Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths (I wrote a post about this)
- Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong–and What You Really Need to Know by Emily Oster.
- Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci
- The Sports Gene by David Epstein
- Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson
- Dataclysm by Christian Rudder
- Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
- Nudge: by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.
The books on my reading list for this summer include:
- Infinite powers: how calculus reveals the secrets of the universe by Steven Strogatz
- Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football by John Urschel
- Cribsheet by Emily Oster (Finally a book about data-driven parenting!)
What else should I read?
Punk Rock Operations Research 
May 22nd, 2019 at 8:37 am
See http://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/ for reviews of lots of popular books on Mathematics. For example, Stephen Ornes has a new book out on mathematically inspired art. https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/math-art-truth-beauty-and-equations
May 22nd, 2019 at 8:40 am
Red plenty by spufford a fiction book on attempts to run the Soviet union by OR
How to cut a cake and math hysteria by Ian stewart
Anything by William poundstone. How to predict… in particular
June 13th, 2019 at 1:07 pm
What about:
The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data
by David Spiegelhalter