Book picks similar to
In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation by William J. Cook
math
mathematics
computer-science
science
Python Machine Learning
Sebastian Raschka - 2015
We are living in an age where data comes in abundance, and thanks to the self-learning algorithms from the field of machine learning, we can turn this data into knowledge. Automated speech recognition on our smart phones, web search engines, e-mail spam filters, the recommendation systems of our favorite movie streaming services – machine learning makes it all possible.Thanks to the many powerful open-source libraries that have been developed in recent years, machine learning is now right at our fingertips. Python provides the perfect environment to build machine learning systems productively.This book will teach you the fundamentals of machine learning and how to utilize these in real-world applications using Python. Step-by-step, you will expand your skill set with the best practices for transforming raw data into useful information, developing learning algorithms efficiently, and evaluating results.You will discover the different problem categories that machine learning can solve and explore how to classify objects, predict continuous outcomes with regression analysis, and find hidden structures in data via clustering. You will build your own machine learning system for sentiment analysis and finally, learn how to embed your model into a web app to share with the world
Book of Proof
Richard Hammack - 2009
It is a bridge from the computational courses (such as calculus or differential equations) that students typically encounter in their first year of college to a more abstract outlook. It lays a foundation for more theoretical courses such as topology, analysis and abstract algebra. Although it may be more meaningful to the student who has had some calculus, there is really no prerequisite other than a measure of mathematical maturity. Topics include sets, logic, counting, methods of conditional and non-conditional proof, disproof, induction, relations, functions and infinite cardinality.
The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg
Robert P. Crease - 2008
Crease tells the stories behind ten of the greatest equations in human history. Was Nobel laureate Richard Feynman really joking when he called Maxwell's electromagnetic equations the most significant event of the nineteenth century? How did Newton's law of gravitation influence young revolutionaries? Why has Euler's formula been called "God's equation," and why did a mysterious ecoterrorist make it his calling card? What role do betrayal, insanity, and suicide play in the second law of thermodynamics?The Great Equations tells the stories of how these equations were discovered, revealing the personal struggles of their ingenious originators. From "1 + 1 = 2" to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Crease locates these equations in the panoramic sweep of Western history, showing how they are as integral to their time and place of creation as are great works of art.
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made
Jason Schreier - 2017
In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Jason Schreier takes readers on a fascinating odyssey behind the scenes of video game development, where the creator may be a team of 600 overworked underdogs or a solitary geek genius. Exploring the artistic challenges, technical impossibilities, marketplace demands, and Donkey Kong-sized monkey wrenches thrown into the works by corporate, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels reveals how bringing any game to completion is more than Sisyphean—it's nothing short of miraculous.Taking some of the most popular, bestselling recent games, Schreier immerses readers in the hellfire of the development process, whether it's RPG studio Bioware's challenge to beat an impossible schedule and overcome countless technical nightmares to build Dragon Age: Inquisition; indie developer Eric Barone's single-handed efforts to grow country-life RPG Stardew Valley from one man's vision into a multi-million-dollar franchise; or Bungie spinning out from their corporate overlords at Microsoft to create Destiny, a brand new universe that they hoped would become as iconic as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings—even as it nearly ripped their studio apart. Documenting the round-the-clock crunches, buggy-eyed burnout, and last-minute saves, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is a journey through development hell—and ultimately a tribute to the dedicated diehards and unsung heroes who scale mountains of obstacles in their quests to create the best games imaginable.
Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace
Leonard Mlodinow - 2001
Here is an altogether new, refreshing, alternative history of math revealing how simple questions anyone might ask about space -- in the living room or in some other galaxy -- have been the hidden engine of the highest achievements in science and technology. Based on Mlodinow's extensive historical research; his studies alongside colleagues such as Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne; and interviews with leading physicists and mathematicians such as Murray Gell-Mann, Edward Witten, and Brian Greene, Euclid's Window is an extraordinary blend of rigorous, authoritative investigation and accessible, good-humored storytelling that makes a stunningly original argument asserting the primacy of geometry. For those who have looked through Euclid's Window, no space, no thing, and no time will ever be quite the same.
Machine Learning
Ethem Alpaydin - 2016
It is the basis for a new approach to artificial intelligence that aims to program computers to use example data or past experience to solve a given problem. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Ethem Alpayd�n offers a concise and accessible overview of the new AI. This expanded edition offers new material on such challenges facing machine learning as privacy, security, accountability, and bias. Alpayd�n, author of a popular textbook on machine learning, explains that as Big Data has gotten bigger, the theory of machine learning--the foundation of efforts to process that data into knowledge--has also advanced. He describes the evolution of the field, explains important learning algorithms, and presents example applications. He discusses the use of machine learning algorithms for pattern recognition; artificial neural networks inspired by the human brain; algorithms that learn associations between instances; and reinforcement learning, when an autonomous agent learns to take actions to maximize reward. In a new chapter, he considers transparency, explainability, and fairness, and the ethical and legal implications of making decisions based on data.
Head First Java
Kathy Sierra - 2005
You might think the problem is your brain. It seems to have a mind of its own, a mind that doesn't always want to take in the dry, technical stuff you're forced to study. The fact is your brain craves novelty. It's constantly searching, scanning, waiting for something unusual to happen. After all, that's the way it was built to help you stay alive. It takes all the routine, ordinary, dull stuff and filters it to the background so it won't interfere with your brain's real work--recording things that matter. How does your brain know what matters? It's like the creators of the Head First approach say, suppose you're out for a hike and a tiger jumps in front of you, what happens in your brain? Neurons fire. Emotions crank up. Chemicals surge. That's how your brain knows.And that's how your brain will learn Java. Head First Java combines puzzles, strong visuals, mysteries, and soul-searching interviews with famous Java objects to engage you in many different ways. It's fast, it's fun, and it's effective. And, despite its playful appearance, Head First Java is serious stuff: a complete introduction to object-oriented programming and Java. You'll learn everything from the fundamentals to advanced topics, including threads, network sockets, and distributed programming with RMI. And the new. second edition focuses on Java 5.0, the latest version of the Java language and development platform. Because Java 5.0 is a major update to the platform, with deep, code-level changes, even more careful study and implementation is required. So learning the Head First way is more important than ever. If you've read a Head First book, you know what to expect--a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works. If you haven't, you're in for a treat. You'll see why people say it's unlike any other Java book you've ever read.By exploiting how your brain works, Head First Java compresses the time it takes to learn and retain--complex information. Its unique approach not only shows you what you need to know about Java syntax, it teaches you to think like a Java programmer. If you want to be bored, buy some other book. But if you want to understand Java, this book's for you.
Head First Data Analysis: A Learner's Guide to Big Numbers, Statistics, and Good Decisions
Michael G. Milton - 2009
If your job requires you to manage and analyze all kinds of data, turn to Head First Data Analysis, where you'll quickly learn how to collect and organize data, sort the distractions from the truth, find meaningful patterns, draw conclusions, predict the future, and present your findings to others. Whether you're a product developer researching the market viability of a new product or service, a marketing manager gauging or predicting the effectiveness of a campaign, a salesperson who needs data to support product presentations, or a lone entrepreneur responsible for all of these data-intensive functions and more, the unique approach in Head First Data Analysis is by far the most efficient way to learn what you need to know to convert raw data into a vital business tool. You'll learn how to:Determine which data sources to use for collecting information Assess data quality and distinguish signal from noise Build basic data models to illuminate patterns, and assimilate new information into the models Cope with ambiguous information Design experiments to test hypotheses and draw conclusions Use segmentation to organize your data within discrete market groups Visualize data distributions to reveal new relationships and persuade others Predict the future with sampling and probability models Clean your data to make it useful Communicate the results of your analysis to your audience Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Data Analysis uses a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.
Feynman Lectures On Computation
Richard P. Feynman - 1996
Feynman gave his famous course on computation at the California Institute of Technology, he asked Tony Hey to adapt his lecture notes into a book. Although led by Feynman, the course also featured, as occasional guest speakers, some of the most brilliant men in science at that time, including Marvin Minsky, Charles Bennett, and John Hopfield. Although the lectures are now thirteen years old, most of the material is timeless and presents a “Feynmanesque” overview of many standard and some not-so-standard topics in computer science such as reversible logic gates and quantum computers.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
Steven Johnson - 2001
Explaining why the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts, Johnson presents surprising examples of feedback, self-organization, and adaptive learning. How does a lively neighborhood evolve out of a disconnected group of shopkeepers, bartenders, and real estate developers? How does a media event take on a life of its own? How will new software programs create an intelligent World Wide Web? In the coming years, the power of self-organization -- coupled with the connective technology of the Internet -- will usher in a revolution every bit as significant as the introduction of electricity. Provocative and engaging, Emergence puts you on the front lines of this exciting upheaval in science and thought.
Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
Linus Torvalds - 2001
Then he wrote a groundbreaking operating system and distributed it via the Internet -- for free. Today Torvalds is an international folk hero. And his creation LINUX is used by over 12 million people as well as by companies such as IBM.Now, in a narrative that zips along with the speed of e-mail, Torvalds gives a history of his renegade software while candidly revealing the quirky mind of a genius. The result is an engrossing portrayal of a man with a revolutionary vision, who challenges our values and may change our world.
Machine Learning
Tom M. Mitchell - 1986
Mitchell covers the field of machine learning, the study of algorithms that allow computer programs to automatically improve through experience and that automatically infer general laws from specific data.
Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
Clive Thompson - 2019
And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet. As we live in a world made of software, they're the architects. The decisions they make guide our behavior. When they make something newly easy to do, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard or impossible to do something, we do less of it.If we want to understand how today's world works, we ought to understand something about coders. Who exactly are the people that are building today's world? What makes them tick? What type of personality is drawn to writing software? And perhaps most interestingly -- what does it do to them?One of the first pieces of coding a newbie learns is the program to make the computer say "Hello, world!" Like that piece of code, Clive Thompson's book is a delightful place to begin to understand this vocation, which is both a profession and a way of life, and which essentially didn't exist little more than a generation ago, but now is considered just about the only safe bet we can make about what the future holds. Thompson takes us close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women. Ironically, if we're going to traffic in stereotypes, women are arguably "naturally" better at coding than men, but they were written out of the history, and shoved out of the seats, for reasons that are illuminating. Now programming is indeed, if not a pure brotopia, at least an awfully homogenous community, which attracts people from a very narrow band of backgrounds and personality types. As Thompson learns, the consequences of that are significant - not least being a fetish for disruption at scale that doesn't leave much time for pondering larger moral issues of collateral damage. At the same time, coding is a marvelous new art form that has improved the world in innumerable ways, and Thompson reckons deeply, as no one before him has, with what great coding in fact looks like, who creates it, and where they come from. To get as close to his subject has he can, he picks up the thread of his own long-abandoned coding practice, and tries his mightiest to up his game, with some surprising results.More and more, any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences, and to understand code, we must understand coders. In that regard, Clive Thompson's Hello, World! is a marvelous and delightful master class.
Mathematical Mysteries: The Beauty and Magic of Numbers
Calvin C. Clawson - 1996
This recreational math book takes the reader on a fantastic voyage into the world of natural numbers. From the earliest discoveries of the ancient Greeks to various fundamental characteristics of the natural number sequence, Clawson explains fascinating mathematical mysteries in clear and easy prose. He delves into the heart of number theory to see and understand the exquisite relationships among natural numbers, and ends by exploring the ultimate mystery of mathematics: the Riemann hypothesis, which says that through a point in a plane, no line can be drawn parallel to a given line.While a professional mathematician's treatment of number theory involves the most sophisticated analytical tools, its basic ideas are surprisingly easy to comprehend. By concentrating on the meaning behind various equations and proofs and avoiding technical refinements, Mathematical Mysteries lets the common reader catch a glimpse of this wonderful and exotic world.
The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing
Martin D. Davis - 2000
How can today's computers perform such a bewildering variety of tasks if computing is just glorified arithmetic? The answer, as Martin Davis lucidly illustrates, lies in the fact that computers are essentially engines of logic. Their hardware and software embody concepts developed over centuries by logicians such as Leibniz, Boole, and Godel, culminating in the amazing insights of Alan Turing. The Universal Computer traces the development of these concepts by exploring with captivating detail the lives and work of the geniuses who first formulated them. Readers will come away with a revelatory understanding of how and why computers work and how the algorithms within them came to be.