Procrastination to the rescue! I want this list for myself so I decided to hand-transcribe it while I avoid doing a bit of real work. I'm 1/5 of the way through but figured I'd share what I've got so far:
Thanks so much everyone for compiling a list! I like to save such lists and take pictures of good books and bookshelves I come across. Full collection is here: https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/books-to-read--2.
... and Google Play Books links. I buy everything from there. Cheaper, and, may I say, probably a better reader app (I like that it collects highlighted text excerpts in a google doc on drive, etc).
A bay area resident who has several thoughtful writings and talks about human computer interaction and more recently a piece on global climate change. AFAIK he is unemployed so he has lots of free time to work on personal projects which may be inspired by the readings on his bookshelf.
Probably refers to "PI", the 1998 movie written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. The main character was an eccentric mathematician who was obsessed with patterns in the decimal expansion of the transcendal number pi. If you have not seen the movie I would encourage you to look for it as my summary is not adequate.
The actual space is really really cool and is the instantiation of their longer-term project, which is supposed to be an attempt to reify D. Engelbart's vision for what computation is to be.
I stopped buying printed books a few years ago, with a couple of exceptions which I kinda regret because they take up space. I love my collection, but it's now split between <20 books at home, and several boxes in storage. Yay, cramped California living!
That said, the bulk of my book collection is now digital, with thousands of PDFs and DJVUs on my laptop, ipad, and network storage. It doesn't have the cachet of a physical bookshelf, though. Maybe I'll print out "ls -R" and tape that to an empty wall?
With rare exception, if I read a good book, I then gift it to someone, loan it to a co-worker, or donate it.
Ironically a bookshelf might be a collection of books the owner wouldn't recommend reading over some other title. Not saying this is the case in the OP photo.
A friend of mine looked over my Netflix streaming queue. He remarked that all of the shows on there sucked. I pointed out that after I watched a show, I deleted it from the queue, so what was left was the dregs :-)
Lots of food for thought. I scanned the rotated version by jarmitage, increasingly worried Byrne's version of Euclid's elements wasn't tere. Wrong, it was further away :)
I would strongly recommend "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." It will help you balance out Silicon Valley's ideal that everything should be large, efficient, and centrally controlled.
Efficient, perhaps; Centrally controlled, I'm not so sure it is a Silicon Valley ideal (i.e. one likes it when they own it, but it's not generally an ideal preached by the SV community.)
It might be hypocritical, but it is a logically consistent point of view. If you desire to exert control on X and it is feasible, you advocate central control when you are the center. On the other hand, if you do not have the power to be the central control and you see some other entity controlling it centrally, you advocate for decentralization.
If you listed every worthwhile book or article you'd read in the last ten years, and all the thoughtful discussions you'd had, you'd probably be surprised. And even more important, the number of books read is not really a great metric. I might take 2 months to go through a math book while the next guy read 15 sci-fi and economics books. But here's the real kicker: neither of us will remember more than a handful of top takeaways two years from now.
How is it possible that this guy can read so many books? SICP alone, for me anyway, takes me about a year to get through. And a lot of these books are pretty dense.
Don't do all the exercises? A lot of them are redundant. Even when SICP was the foundation of Berkeley/MIT's intro CS classes (which is no longer the case), the classes would only do a few key projects.
Some of the books are textbooks that take a few months to get through (about 1 month of full-time effort when non-employed, if you consider that you'll read about 4 textbooks in a semester of school), and many are rather casual reads (biography, history, and pop science)
His shelf seems to be an almost perfect superset of mine, the only obvious thing I don't see is Fire In The Valley by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger, a very nice history of the early PC revolution in Silicon Valley. I should probably get him a copy so I can just use a picture of his wall with the stuff I don't have blacked out.
I wonder how many were fully read? I have started tracking my books with little star stickers after I fully read them. My goal is to get 1 star on all of them, 2 stars if I want to consider myself knowledgeable and 3 stars for expert level.
If you read the original bookshelf as a matrix look at row 3 column 3. I recognized at least 5 books on geometric algebra and geometric calculus. This is the way geometry will be done in the future.
Interesting that Bret is a big fan of Geometric Algebra (keeping several books on the topic), which is alluring to amateurs, but dismissed by professional mathematicians/physicists as a vanity effort to rename standard concepts.
Roger Penrose's Road to Reality makes use of Clifford Algebra and Grassmann Products, so at least some serious physicists are using it seriously.
Even though I had come across it before, I had a real revelation when I read David Hestenes short paper on it (from Bret Victor's website) http://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes-ReformingTheMathematical...
It is indeed beautiful to see how complex geometry and vector fields are connected via GA. I found especially revealing the relationship between electric and magnetic fields. I agree with the article that whatever its absolute merits, it would be a good way to teach new physicists. I have already ordered my copy of "Clifford Algebra to Geometric Calculus".
Whether it is actually more practical to do work in General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, or indeed Quantum Field Theory etc., I'll have to leave for the experts in those fields. From an outsider's perspective, it is a delight to understand some of the connections between different disciplines in a more intuitive way.
In any case, I would imagine that GA is exceptionally useful for computer graphics and physical simulations.
85 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadhttp://i.imgur.com/pKscQRm.jpg
Edit: working on typing these up with links, Tesseract couldn't handle it :P
Anyone know how to retrieve Amazon links from book titles?
If anyone wants to help: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lWnncM61FsDb47jMheTc...
Edit: I tried running the image against couple of OCRs but was futile.
Found categorized list [0] on his site. May be dated.
[0] http://worrydream.com/#!/Links
(edit: deleted link, use Jack's instead)
Come join?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lWnncM61FsDb47jMheTc...
Although I SHUDDER to think of the combined hourly billing rate of everyone who's contributing here :)
Will get this content back on the spreadsheet if I get some time later tonight.
Also started badgering Bret over the unmarked books. It's been a fun evening.
Figured it would take longer to OCR it than to do it manually in this case
"A Shorter Model Theory" by Hodges
"Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction" by Sutton and Barto
"Neuro-Dynamic Programming" by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis
"Set Theory An Introduction To Independence Proofs" by Kunen
"Naive Set Theory" by Halmos
Thanks so much everyone for compiling a list! I like to save such lists and take pictures of good books and bookshelves I come across. Full collection is here: https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/books-to-read--2.
Or rather that is the least common multiple of everything on that site.
(http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046437/5-steps-to-recreate-xero...)
Like, he hires researchers to work under him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator
"Inventing on Principle"
https://vimeo.com/36579366
Books on a shelf aren't impressive.
What did you mean by connecting it with Bret's bookshelf though?
SAP hired Alan Kay, Bret Victor, Vi Hart, and others to create a Xerox PARC / MIT Media Lab type lab.
That said, the bulk of my book collection is now digital, with thousands of PDFs and DJVUs on my laptop, ipad, and network storage. It doesn't have the cachet of a physical bookshelf, though. Maybe I'll print out "ls -R" and tape that to an empty wall?
I have, though, started maintaining a list (~shelf) of readings, physical and otherwise like this: http://www.andjosh.com/lists/reading/
Ironically a bookshelf might be a collection of books the owner wouldn't recommend reading over some other title. Not saying this is the case in the OP photo.
If you listed every worthwhile book or article you'd read in the last ten years, and all the thoughtful discussions you'd had, you'd probably be surprised. And even more important, the number of books read is not really a great metric. I might take 2 months to go through a math book while the next guy read 15 sci-fi and economics books. But here's the real kicker: neither of us will remember more than a handful of top takeaways two years from now.
But seriously, he's _very_ good at what he does.
http://blog.fogus.me/2012/02/22/reading/
http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/23/extreme-reading/
http://faculty.luther.edu/~macdonal/ http://geometry.mrao.cam.ac.uk/2015/10/geometric-algebra-201...
He has almost every non-fiction book on my Goodreads list: Books Scientists Should Read Before The Age Of 20. https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/75031.Books_Scientists_S...
Forget Amazon recommendations: this is the basis for my 2016 reading list.
Thanks for those that have worked hard to list the books!
Another person here took a sequence of shots and just linked the individual images.
If you like tinkering, the step up from that would be stitching the images together with something like Hugin.
Even though I had come across it before, I had a real revelation when I read David Hestenes short paper on it (from Bret Victor's website) http://worrydream.com/refs/Hestenes-ReformingTheMathematical... It is indeed beautiful to see how complex geometry and vector fields are connected via GA. I found especially revealing the relationship between electric and magnetic fields. I agree with the article that whatever its absolute merits, it would be a good way to teach new physicists. I have already ordered my copy of "Clifford Algebra to Geometric Calculus".
Whether it is actually more practical to do work in General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, or indeed Quantum Field Theory etc., I'll have to leave for the experts in those fields. From an outsider's perspective, it is a delight to understand some of the connections between different disciplines in a more intuitive way.
In any case, I would imagine that GA is exceptionally useful for computer graphics and physical simulations.