If: A Mind-Bending New Way of Looking at Big Ideas and Numbers

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

Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine

Laurie Wallmark · 38 pages

Offers an illustrated telling of the story of Ada Byron Lovelace, from her early creative fascination with mathematics and science and her devastating bout with measles, to the ground-breaking algorithm she wrote for Charles Babbage's analytical engine.

Sir Cumference and the Sword in the Cone

Cindy Neuschwander · 32 pages

The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos

Deborah Heiligman · 42 pages

Most people think of mathematicians as solitary, working away in isolation. And, it's true, many of them do. But Paul Erdos never followed the usual path. At the age of four, he could ask you when you were born and then calculate the number of seconds you had been alive in his head. But he didn't learn to butter his own bread until he turned twenty. Instead, he traveled around the world, from one

How Much Is a Million?

David M. Schwartz · 40 pages

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart

Ian Ayres · 266 pages

Why would a casino try and stop you from losing? How can a mathematical formula find your future spouse? Would you know if a statistical analysis blackballed you from a job you wanted? Today, number crunching affects your life in ways you might never imagine. In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive dat

An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise

John Robinson Pierce · 305 pages

The Librarian Who Measured the Earth

Kathryn Lasky · 48 pages

A colorfully illustrated biography of the Greek philosopher and scientist Eratosthenes, who compiled the first geography book and accurately measured the globe's circumference.

The Grand Design

Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow · 200 pages

When and how did the universe begin? Why are we here? What is the nature of reality? Is the apparent grand design of our universe evidence for a benevolent creator who set things in motion? Or does science offer another explanation? In The Grand Design, the most recent scientific thinking about the mysteries of the universe is presented, in language marked by both brilliance and simplicity. The G

Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum

Leonard Susskind, Art Friedman · 384 pages

Explains the theory and associated mathematics of quantum mechanics, discussing topics ranging from uncertainty and time dependence to particle and wave states.

Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

Charles Seife · 312 pages

In the tradition of Stephen Colbert's concept of truthiness, Proofiness explores the intersection of chicanery and mathematics. The author explores regression, false correlation, Potemkin numbers, and a variety of other sketchy techniques used to make people think that the data reflect patterns that don't exist in actuality. How to Lie With Statistics would strike me as a readalike.

The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes

Rudy Rucker · 228 pages

In text, pictures, and puzzles, the author immerses his readers in an amazing exploration of a mysterious realm -- a realm once seen only by mystics, physicists, and mathematicians.

Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jar

Masaichiro Anno, Mitsumasa Anno · 45 pages

Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

Douglas R. Hofstadter · 852 pages

Toen 'Godel, Escher, Bach' verscheen in 1979 was Hofstadter in een klap wereldberoemd. Het is maar weinigen gegeven zo met taal en kennis te spelen: briljant, erudiet, creatief, humoristisch, en didaktisch van zeer hoog niveau. Dezelfde kwaliteiten bepalen het gezicht van 'Metamagische thema's'. Het is een bundeling van artikelen die in de jaren 1981-1983 in de Scientific American verschenen en di

The Story of Snow: The Science of Winter's Wonder

Mark Cassino, Jon Nelson · 33 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

Thinking In Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math

Daniel Tammet · 288 pages

An engrossing blend of Autobiography, mathematical theory, and 'what if' speculations. A fascinating even dizzying series of fresh perspectives on things we thought we knew -Billy collins

Prisoner's Dilemma

William Poundstone · 290 pages

Watching players bluff in a poker game inspired John von Neumann--father of the modern computer and one of the sharpest minds of the century--to construct game theory, a mathematical study of conflict and deception. Game theory was embraced at the RAND Corporation, the think tank charged with formulating military strategy for the atomic age, and in 1950 two RAND scientists discovered the "prisoner

Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do

Kaiser Fung · 224 pages

Why Do Buses Come in Threes?: The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life

Robert Eastaway, Jeremy Wyndham · 156 pages

Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham take you on a mesmerizing journey through the logic of life in a quest for the hidden mathematics in everyday events. It's a world in which Newton's laws explain bar fights and there may be solid reasons why your shower always runs either too hot or too cold. Did you think it was all a matter of coincidence? Universal randomness? To put it in a more philosophic pers

Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences

John Allen Paulos · 152 pages

Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences is a 1988 book by mathematician John Allen Paulos about innumeracy (deficiency of numeracy) as the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy: incompetence with numbers rather than words. Innumeracy is a problem with many otherwise educated and knowledgeable people.