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Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
Leonard Mlodinow · 252 pages
In this irreverent and illuminating book, acclaimed writer and scientist Leonard Mlodinow shows us how randomness, change, and probability reveal a tremendous amount about our daily lives, and how we misunderstand the significance of everything from a casual conversation to a major financial setback. As a result, successes and failures in life are often attributed to clear and obvious cases, when
Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life
Len Fisher · 265 pages
The IgNobel Prize-winning author of How to Dunk a Doughnut draws on the science of game theory to explain how human beings cooperate in everyday life.
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
Daniel J. Levitin · 304 pages
Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi · 310 pages
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 320 pages
*A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything* Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't
Nate Silver · 544 pages
Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the wo
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
Max Tegmark · 432 pages
"Max Tegmark leads us on an astonishing journey through past, present, and future, and through the physics, astronomy and mathematics that are the foundation of his work, most particularly his hypothesis that our physical reality is a mathematical structure and his theory of the ultimate multiverse. In a dazzling combination of both popular and ground-breaking science, he not only helps us grasp h
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Munroe · 312 pages
Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 400 pages
Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do
Kaiser Fung · 224 pages
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
Simon Singh · 402 pages
In his first book since the bestselling *Fermat's Enigma*, Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisit
The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
Edward Dolnick · 398 pages
The Improbability Principle: Why coincidences, miracles and rare events happen all the time
David J. Hand · 288 pages
A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein
Palle Yourgrau · 217 pages
It is a widely known but little considered fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. The two walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German-Austrian science in which they had grown up. What is not widely known is the
The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse
Jennifer Ouellette · 318 pages
A mathphobe explores calculus by starting at the quotidian (more or less) and working to the underlying principles described by calculus.
The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity
Steven H. Strogatz · 336 pages
Many people take math in high school and promptly forget much of it. But math plays a part in all of our lives all of the time, whether we know it or not. In The Joy of x, Steven Strogatz expands on his hit New York Times series to explain the big ideas of math gently and clearly, with wit, insight, and brilliant illustrations. Whether he is illuminating how often you should flip your mattress
The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics
Marcus du Sautoy · 351 pages
The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless
John D. Barrow · 328 pages
How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life
Jordan Ellenberg · 468 pages
Here's Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math
Alex Bellos · 327 pages