Book picks similar to
Foundations of Complex-System Theories: In Economics, Evolutionary Biology, and Statistical Physics by Sunny Y. Auyang
science
economics
complex-systems
complexity
Thinking Statistically
Uri Bram - 2011
Along the way we’ll learn how selection bias can explain why your boss doesn’t know he sucks (even when everyone else does); how to use Bayes’ Theorem to decide if your partner is cheating on you; and why Mark Zuckerberg should never be used as an example for anything. See the world in a whole new light, and make better decisions and judgements without ever going near a t-test. Think. Think Statistically.
On Being a Data Skeptic
Cathy O'Neil - 2013
Data is nuanced, and "a really excellent skeptic puts the term 'science' into 'data science.'" The big data revolution shouldn't be dismissed as hype, but current data science tools and models shouldn't be hailed as the end-all-be-all, either."
Elements of Partial Differential Equations
Ian N. Sneddon - 2006
It emphasizes forms suitable for students and researchers whose interest lies in solving equations rather than in general theory. Solutions to odd-numbered problems appear at the end. 1957 edition.
Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, and Just About Everything Else
Amir D. Aczel - 2003
Aczel turns his sights on probability theory -- the branch of mathematics that measures the likelihood of a random event. He explains probability in clear, layman's terms, and shows its practical applications. What is commonly called luck has mathematical roots and in Chance, you'll learn to increase your odds of success in everything from true love to the stock market. For thousands of years, the twin forces of chance and mischance have beguiled humanity like none other. Why does fortune smile on some people, and smirk on others? What is luck, and why does it so often visit the undeserving? How can we predict the random events happening around us? Even better, how can we manipulate them? In this delightful and lucid voyage through the realm of the random, Dr. Aczel once again makes higher mathematics intelligible to us.
Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey
R. Duncan Luce - 1957
Clear, comprehensive coverage of utility theory, 2-person zero-sum games, 2-person non-zero-sum games, n-person games, individual and group decision-making, more. Bibliography.
Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies
Cesar A. Hidalgo - 2015
He believes that we should investigate what makes some countries more capable than others. Complex products—from films to robots, apps to automobiles—are a physical distillation of an economy’s knowledge, a measurable embodiment of its education, infrastructure, and capability. Economic wealth accrues when applications of this knowledge turn ideas into tangible products; the more complex its products, the more economic growth a country will experience.A radical new interpretation of global economics, Why Information Grows overturns traditional assumptions about the development of economies and the origins of wealth and takes a crucial step toward making economics less the dismal science and more the insightful one.
Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds
Mitchel Resnick - 1994
Mitchel Resnick's book is one of the very few in the field of computing with an interdisciplinary discourse that can reach beyond the technical community to philosophers, psychologists, and historians and sociologists of science." -- Sherry Turkle, Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "Resnick's work provides a rare glimpse of what I am sure will become a new paradigm for research in education.
The Science of Information: From Language to Black Holes
Benjamin Schumacher - 2015
Never before in history have we been able to acquire, record, communicate, and use information in so many different forms. Never before have we had access to such vast quantities of data of every kind. This revolution goes far beyond the limitless content that fills our lives, because information also underlies our understanding of ourselves, the natural world, and the universe. It is the key that unites fields as different as linguistics, cryptography, neuroscience, genetics, economics, and quantum mechanics. And the fact that information bears no necessary connection to meaning makes it a profound puzzle that people with a passion for philosophy have pondered for centuries.Table of ContentsLECTURE 1The Transformability of Information 4LECTURE 2Computation and Logic Gates 17LECTURE 3Measuring Information 26LECTURE 4Entropy and the Average Surprise 34LECTURE 5Data Compression and Prefix-Free Codes 44LECTURE 6Encoding Images and Sounds 57LECTURE 7Noise and Channel Capacity 69LECTURE 8Error-Correcting Codes 82LECTURE 9Signals and Bandwidth 94LECTURE 10Cryptography and Key Entropy 110LECTURE 11Cryptanalysis and Unraveling the Enigma 119LECTURE 12Unbreakable Codes and Public Keys 130LECTURE 13What Genetic Information Can Do 140LECTURE 14Life’s Origins and DNA Computing 152LECTURE 15Neural Codes in the Brain 169LECTURE 16Entropy and Microstate Information 185LECTURE 17Erasure Cost and Reversible Computing 198LECTURE 18Horse Races and Stock Markets 213LECTURE 19Turing Machines and Algorithmic Information 226LECTURE 20Uncomputable Functions and Incompleteness 239LECTURE 21Qubits and Quantum Information 253LECTURE 22Quantum Cryptography via Entanglement 266LECTURE 23It from Bit: Physics from Information 281LECTURE 24The Meaning of Information 293
Move up
Clotaire Rapaille - 2013
Si todos debemos movernos para sobrevivir, vale la pena preguntarse: ¿qué factores de nuestro entorno nos impulsan a movernos y cuáles, por el contrario, nos detienen? ¿Por qué algunas personas tienen la oportunidad de moverse hacia donde quieren y otras no? ¿Por qué ciertas sociedades evolucionan y otras no? Para responder a estas interrogantes, los autores del libro estudiaron los códigos culturales y el comportamiento Bio-Lógico de 71 países para desarrollar un índice de que permite medir la movilidad social dentro de estas sociedades.Andrés Roemer y Clotaire Rapaille señalan que las culturas más exitosas son aquellas que han sabido preservar los mejores aspectos de su tradición, al mismo tiempo que han estado dispuestas a innovar y buscar nuevos horizontes. Se trata de sociedades abiertas al cambio y sin temor al statu quo. Otra clave del éxito evolutivo de las sociedades es el equilibrio entre el aspecto biológico (determinado por cuatro factores: supervivencia, sexo, seguridad y superación) y el aspecto cultural. El reto, concluyen los autores, es aprender a armonizar nuestros instintos (nuestro cerebro reptiliano) con nuestras emociones (nuestro cerebro límbico) y nuestra lógica (el neocórtex).ENGLISH DESCRIPTION If we all know we must move to survive, shouldn’t we ask ourselves which factors in our environment propel us and which halt us? Why do certain societies evolve while others don’t? In this book, Andrés Roemer and Clotaire Rapaille point out that the most successful cultures are those that are not afraid of the status quo: they have learned to preserve the best qualities of their traditions while being open to innovation and to uncovering new horizons. Another key to the success of these societies is the equilibrium between biological and the cultural aspects. The challenge is to harmonize our instincts, our emotions, and our logic.
Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business
Richard Tanner Pascale - 2000
It offers a bold new way of thinking about and responding to the personal and strategic challenges everyone in business faces these days.
Game Theory. Analysis of conflict
Roger B. Myerson - 1991
Myerson introduces, clarifies, and synthesizes the extraordinary advances made in the subject over the past fifteen years, presents an overview of decision theory, and comprehensively reviews the development of the fundamental models: games in extensive form and strategic form, and Bayesian games with incomplete information.Game Theory will be useful for students at the graduate level in economics, political science, operations research, and applied mathematics. Everyone who uses game theory in research will find this book essential.
Turing's Vision: The Birth of Computer Science
Chris Bernhardt - 2016
This groundbreaking and powerful theory now forms the basis of computer science. In Turing's Vision, Chris Bernhardt explains the theory, Turing's most important contribution, for the general reader. Bernhardt argues that the strength of Turing's theory is its simplicity, and that, explained in a straightforward manner, it is eminently understandable by the nonspecialist. As Marvin Minsky writes, -The sheer simplicity of the theory's foundation and extraordinary short path from this foundation to its logical and surprising conclusions give the theory a mathematical beauty that alone guarantees it a permanent place in computer theory.- Bernhardt begins with the foundation and systematically builds to the surprising conclusions. He also views Turing's theory in the context of mathematical history, other views of computation (including those of Alonzo Church), Turing's later work, and the birth of the modern computer.In the paper, -On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, - Turing thinks carefully about how humans perform computation, breaking it down into a sequence of steps, and then constructs theoretical machines capable of performing each step. Turing wanted to show that there were problems that were beyond any computer's ability to solve; in particular, he wanted to find a decision problem that he could prove was undecidable. To explain Turing's ideas, Bernhardt examines three well-known decision problems to explore the concept of undecidability; investigates theoretical computing machines, including Turing machines; explains universal machines; and proves that certain problems are undecidable, including Turing's problem concerning computable numbers.
The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding
Humberto R. Maturana - 1984
Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication.
The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex
Murray Gell-Mann - 1994
Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann offers a uniquely personal and unifying vision of the relationship between the fundamental laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world.
Pythagoras's Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender War
Margaret Wertheim - 1995
From its inception, Margaret Wertheim shows, physics has been an overwhelmingly male-dominated activity; she argues that gender inequity in physics is a result of the religious origins of the enterprise.Pythagoras' Trousers is a highly original history of one of science's most powerful disciplines. It is also a passionate argument for the need to involve both women and men in the process of shaping the technologies from the next generation of physicists.