Book picks similar to
Fermat's Last Theorem by Ran Van Vo
non-fiction
science
maths
mathematics
A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature
Tom Siegfried - 2006
Today Nash's beautiful math has become a universal language for research in the social sciences and has infiltrated the realms of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and even quantum physics. John Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering research published in the 1950s on a new branch of mathematics known as game theory. At the time of Nash's early work, game theory was briefly popular among some mathematicians and Cold War analysts. But it remained obscure until the 1970s when evolutionary biologists began applying it to their work. In the 1980s economists began to embrace game theory. Since then it has found an ever expanding repertoire of applications among a wide range of scientific disciplines. Today neuroscientists peer into game players' brains, anthropologists play games with people from primitive cultures, biologists use games to explain the evolution of human language, and mathematicians exploit games to better understand social networks. A common thread connecting much of this research is its relevance to the ancient quest for a science of human social behavior, or a Code of Nature, in the spirit of the fictional science of psychohistory described in the famous Foundation novels by the late Isaac Asimov. In A Beautiful Math, acclaimed science writer Tom Siegfried describes how game theory links the life sciences, social sciences, and physical sciences in a way that may bring Asimov's dream closer to reality.
The Things That Make Us: Life, loss and football
Nick Riewoldt - 2017
1 pick in the 2000 AFL draft, to six-time winner of St Kilda's best and fairest award, to five-time All Australian, to captaining his club for a record 220 games, to more than 330 games as a star of the AFL, Nick Riewoldt is an out-and-out champion.The Things that Make Us is Nick's autobiography, written with a deep intelligence and insight, and giving a fascinating perspective on his extraordinary life and career. As Nick describes it:'I hope there's something in these pages for everyone who's known grief, especially anyone who's lost a sibling. I hope, too, that my story brings a deeper understanding of a footballer's crazy world. An insight into what goes into making it, what it takes to stay there, and the crippling anxiety that can consume you when your burden is to accept only the best. I hope it paints a picture of what it's like to be the focus of acclamation and scandal, the good and bad of a searing spotlight, and how these experiences can bring out the best and worst in us.'I hope it honours my family - the German and Tasmanian sides with their stories of struggle and endurance - who are the essence of the book's title. I hope it gives thanks for the love I found on the other side of the world, and the beautiful next generation Cath and I are building together. 'I hope above all that it honours my sister Maddie. 'These are the things that made me.'The Things That Make Us is the intimate, powerful and revealing account of the life of an AFL superstar, and a classic in the making.
Healed of Cancer
Dodie Osteen - 1986
She ministers alongside her husband, Pastor John Osteen, at Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, known as "An Oas
Becoming Human: Our Past, Present and Future
Scientific American - 2013
Kisses From Nimbus: From SAS to MI6 An Autobiography
P.J. 'Red' Riley - 2017
His is the story the establishment doesn’t want you to read.br>Captain P. J. “Red” Riley is an ex-SAS soldier who served for eighteen years as an MI6 agent. Riley escaped internment in Chile during the Falklands war during an audacious top-secret attempt to attack the Argentinian mainland. He was imprisoned in the darkness of the Sierra Leonean jungle, and withstood heavy fire in war-torn Beirut and Syria. In 2015, he was arrested for murder but all charges were later dropped. In this searing memoir, Riley reveals the brutal realities of his service, and the truth behind the newspaper headlines featuring some of the most significant events in recent British history. His account provides startling new evidence on the Iraq war, what Tony Blair really knew about Saddam Hussain’s weapons of mass destruction before the allied invasion, and questions the British government’s alleged involvement in the death of Princess Diana. Chaotic, darkly humorous and at times heart-wrenchingly sad, Kisses From Nimbus charts the harrowing real-life experiences of a soldier and spy in the name of Queen and country.
It Shouldn’t Happen to a Manager
Harry Redknapp - 2016
There’ve been big highs, but a fair share of lows too. When I have to make difficult decisions, I make a point of avoiding newspapers, phone-ins, Twitter – all of it. But there’s always a load of armchair-pundits waiting to start on me. Being a manager has never been easy, but between the fans and the media it often feels impossible to get it right.In It Shouldn’t Happen to a Manager, I talk about how different the job is now from what it was like when I used to play. For one, managers used to drive up and down motorways all day to scout for players – now there’s so much analysis and global scouting. It’s a different thing, completely. In this book, I share everything I’ve learnt from a lifetime of both wins and losses, and wisdom from greats like Cloughie and Ferguson. I’ll tell you about what actually happens in the dressing room, including when Clough smashed the door off its hinges; the bust-ups at full-time, like when I kicked a tray of sandwiches on Don Hutchinson’s head; and the times when I had to swap an arm round a player’s shoulder for a boot up the arse. It’s my guide to being a manager, the Harry way.
CLOUGH GOLD
Dave Armitage - 2014
Ex-players, close friends, journalists, managers and former colleagues reveal their astonishing brushes with the greatest football manager England never had. The stories are cherry-picked from two acclaimed books - 150BC: Cloughie the Inside Stories and Clough: Confidential. An additional 242 stories can be found in these two volumes. So, enter the whirlwind world of Old Big 'Ead and prepare to be entertained.
The Good, the Mad and the Ugly: The Andy Morrison Story
Andy Morrison - 2011
The autobiography of the most troubled footballer of modern times.
Louis van Gaal: The Biography
Maarten Meijer - 2014
He is certainly, by his own admission, a man who leaves nothing to chance. A disciple in the 1970s of Rinus Michels' Total Football philosophy, he is a fascinating contradiction - an ultra-individualist utterly devoted to the collective effort. He believes in the team over the individual, in always having a plan and a team prepared to follow that plan. Van Gaal led the young Ajax team he moulded to Champions League glory in 1995, went on to win titles across Europe with Barcelona, AZ Alkmaar and Bayern Munich and is currently in his second stint as national coach of Holland. It is a career that has never been short on colour and drama - from fallouts with players to rants at the media wherever he has managed. Dutch football commentator Maarten Meijer's has written the definitive biography of Van Gaal - both the man and his methods. It offers the best psychological insight so far - from his earliest roots to his greatest triumphs - into the man given the task of returning the glory days to Manchester United.
The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
Edward Dolnick - 2011
A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with nature’s most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world.At the end of the seventeenth century—an age of religious wars, plague, and the Great Fire of London—when most people saw the world as falling apart, these earliest scientists saw a world of perfect order. They declared that, chaotic as it looked, the universe was in fact as intricate and perfectly regulated as a clock. This was the tail end of Shakespeare’s century, when the natural land the supernatural still twined around each other. Disease was a punishment ordained by God, astronomy had not yet broken free from astrology, and the sky was filled with omens. It was a time when little was known and everything was new. These brilliant, ambitious, curious men believed in angels, alchemy, and the devil, and they also believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws—-a contradiction that tormented them and changed the course of history.The Clockwork Universe is the fascinating and compelling story of the bewildered geniuses of the Royal Society, the men who made the modern world.
Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality
Edward Frenkel - 2013
In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel shows that mathematics, far from occupying a specialist niche, goes to the heart of all matter, uniting us across cultures, time, and space.Love and Math tells two intertwined stories: of the wonders of mathematics and of one young man’s journey learning and living it. Having braved a discriminatory educational system to become one of the twenty-first century’s leading mathematicians, Frenkel now works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of math in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program. Considered by many to be a Grand Unified Theory of mathematics, the Langlands Program enables researchers to translate findings from one field to another so that they can solve problems, such as Fermat’s last theorem, that had seemed intractable before.At its core, Love and Math is a story about accessing a new way of thinking, which can enrich our lives and empower us to better understand the world and our place in it. It is an invitation to discover the magic hidden universe of mathematics.
Mind Games: Inside the Serial Killer Phenomenon
Paul Harrison - 2018
It will shock, surprise and astound the reader. Paul Harrison has a unique set of skills and experiences based upon his life in the British police service and later as a crime writer. Now, for the first time ever, you can read of his gripping experiences as a profiler dealing with the world's most notorious serial killers and violent offenders. Mind Games is a forensic examination of the psyche of the world's most vicious and evil offenders in their own words, just as they related it. It's an exploration into the darkest recesses of the criminal mind and possibly the most in-depth examination of the serial killer phenomenon ever published. Includes exclusive interviews with Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Kenneth Harrison, Henry Lee Lucas, Aileen Wuornos, Ted Bundy, Carl Watts, Donald 'Pee Wee' Gaskins, Donald Neilson, Kenneth McDuff, Jeffrey Dahmer, Joe 'The Cannibal' Metheney.
The Fire She Set
Leigh Overton Boyd - 2020
They did not talk about their mom's extended absences or why their dad put Scotch tape on the backdoor frame. To cover up the chaos, they kept their clothes neat and got good grades. But when they were teenagers, an arson fire destroyed their home and killed their parents. Rumors were thick that summer that smart, angry, fourteen-year-old Lisa set the blaze. Then, adult powers they did not understand squelched the investigation. As teenagers accustomed to keeping silent, they packed up and moved on.Forty years later, Leigh, the oldest, decided it was time to find out who killed their parents. She obtained copies of the police and fire investigations and began unwrapping the past. This memoir is the story of that investigation as Leigh tried to piece together the truth, but found more lies instead. With the help of her sisters, Leigh was able to reconstruct much of what happened to them in the beach towns around Atlantic City in the early 1970s. After the fire, one sister turned to heroin and another to alcohol; Leigh became Miss Atlantic City. Then, one by one, they each moved to California and shut the door on their past, even though they privately wondered whether one of them killed Frank and Nancy Overton. It's funny. They never wondered whether one of their parents was trying to kill them.
Darwin's Odyssey: The Voyage of the Beagle (Kindle Single)
Kevin Jackson - 2013
For five years in his mid-twenties, he sailed on the BEAGLE around the world, exploring jungles, climbing mountains, trekking across deserts. With every new landfall, he had new adventures: he rode through bandit country, was thrown into jail by revolutionaries, took part in an armed raid with marines, survived two earthquakes, hunted and fished. He suffered the terrible cold and rain of Tierra del Fuego, the merciless heat of the Australian outback and the inner pangs of heartbreak. He also made the discoveries that finally led him to formulate his theory of Natural Selection as the driving force of evolution. The five-year voyage of the BEAGLE was the basis for all Darwin's later work; but it also turned him from a friendly idler into the greatest scientist of his century. Kevin Jackson is a writer, broadcaster and film-maker. His most recent book is Constellation of Genius: 1922 and All That Jazz (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2013). He lives in Cambridge, England.
Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Logic and Math
Joseph Mazur - 2004
Underpinning both math and science, it is the foundation of every major advancement in knowledge since the time of the ancient Greeks. Through adventure stories and historical narratives populated with a rich and quirky cast of characters, Mazur artfully reveals the less-than-airtight nature of logic and the muddled relationship between math and the real world. Ultimately, Mazur argues, logical reasoning is not purely robotic. At its most basic level, it is a creative process guided by our intuitions and beliefs about the world.