I am re-reading "Empire Express", about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. One of the proposals in the 1830s came from Dr. Harwell Carver of St. Louis (who really seems to be an also-ran who claimed that he came up with the idea after somebody else got famous for it):

The quality of teas would be much better coming to us in a few ( Read more... )

"Love and Math" is by Edward Frenkel. It tries to show the beauty of modern mathematics by taking the reader on an autobiographical tour of Frenkel's career, explaining the concepts and connections he's worked with over the years. Mathematical beauty, he says, ought to be accessible to non-mathematicians in the same way that beautiful paintings ( Read more... )

I'm being driven kind of nuts by this book because it confuses perfect machine learning with near-perfect predictive ability. The examples given for the consequences for P=NP are simply outlandish. That's not so say they're all wrong--- machine-generated proofs really could demolish long-held problems if that were the situation. But in other ( Read more... )