two books

Feb 28, 2008 22:59

Book 1
The Myriad: The voyage of the Merrimack #1 by R. M. Meluch

This book was awesome. Well written mil sci/fi with honest characters. The marines are all gung-ho and the enemies are over the top. The science is great, causality is touched on. The patterner (I can't help but read Mentat) is honorable and a machine but with his own humanity. The captain is balls to the wall gung ho, a warrior you expect to be walking a deck battling pirates. The American LEN interaction mimics the current view many have of Americans and immediately brings to mind Team America. A great read with a kind of disappointing but wonderfully consistent ending that raises a few wonderful questions

book 2
The Secret Life of Numbers: Fifty Easy Pieces on How Mathematicians Work and Think by George G. Szpiro

Not such a great book. Definitely for the lay reader. It does come from an interesting point of view. A Swiss reporter from the Israeli desk of a Swiss newspaper, it puts a different bias on the work. I read more about swiss mathematicians than I had every really done before. But the math was simple and not well explained. For a more technical read with greater scope, i would highly recommend The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers by Ben Yandell. That was an awesome book with lots of history, some great applications and a richer feel for the mathematics
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