I’ve just started reading Invisible in the Storm: The Role of Mathematics in Understanding Weather. The subtitle may be a little misleading. There is a fair amount of math in the book, but the ratio of history to math is…
Blog Archives
Three new Python books
This post reviews three Python books that have come out recently: SciPy and NumPy from O’Reilly Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming from No Starch Press NumPy Cookbook from Packt SciPy and NumPy by Eli Bressert is the…
PowerShell for Developers
PowerShell was written first and foremost for Windows system administrators, and the benefits to this community are clear. It’s not as clear what developers should make of PowerShell. Administrators can learn PowerShell as a shell first, and gradually transition from…
Tolkien podcast
If you’re a Tolkien fan, check out Corey Olsen’s web site The Tolkien Professor and his podcast by the same name. Thanks to Dave Kale for telling me about it.
Late to the party
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good is a hard book to judge by its cover. It’s about the Haskell programming language, but what is it like? The title and the art work are playful, and that gives the impression…
Henri Poincaré: A Scientific Biography
The first clue that Henri Poincaré: A Scientific Biography is not going to be a typical biography is in the table of contents. It lists one appendix on elliptic and Abelian functions and another on Maxwell’s equations. This is a…
George Boole, Claude Shannon, and information
Paul Nahin writes books that are somewhere between popular and academic. His books are popular, but not light reading. They tell a story, but they go into more detail than most popular books. (I haven’t read everything Nahin has written,…
Epics in 99 seconds
Jon Cozart’s video Harry Potter in 99 Seconds has been viewed over 10 million times on YouTube. Today he posted a similar video, Lord of the Rings in 99 Seconds: A couple more of Jon’s videos I’d recommend: Paper Beatbox…
Painting with Numbers
Painting with Numbers is a new book of advice on making numerical presentations. The book is very elementary. It contains no math beyond arithmetic, and it focuses almost entirely on financial data in Excel spreadsheets. But it does have useful…
When a good author writes a bad book
The other day I read a terribly bland book by an author I’ve previously enjoyed. (I’d rather not name the book or the author.) The book was remarkably unremarkable. It reminded me that even the best strike out now and…
Why read and write tech books?
Now that we have Google, countless blogs, and Stack Overflow, why should anyone buy technical books? And why should anybody write them? Charles Petzold’s answer is that books provide a narrative in a way that the web cannot. Books about…
Differential Equations and the City
This afternoon I got a review copy of X and the City: Modeling Aspects of Urban Life by John A. Adam. It’s a book about mathematical model, taking all its examples from urban life: public transportation, growth, pollution, etc. I’ve only…
Reading historical math
I recently received review copies of two books by Benjamin Wardhaugh. Here I will discuss How to Read Historical Mathematics. The other book is his anthology of historical popular mathematics which I intend to review later. Here is the key…
Simmer reading list
One of my friends mentioned his “simmer reading” yesterday. It was a typo — he meant to say “summer” — but a simmer reading list is interesting. Simmer reading makes me think of a book that stays on your nightstand…
Read history and fly an airplane
The “About the Author” page at the end of Programming in Emacs Lisp says Robert J. Chassell … has an abiding interest in social and economic history and flies his own airplane. I love the child-like element of that bio.…
