Books at the Box Office | Books - New York Times

Check out Match Book’s earlier recommendations here.

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Follow on Twitter as @NicoleALamy

In Match Book, Nicole Lamy connects readers with book suggestions based on their questions, their tastes, their literary needs and desires.

Photo: Joon Mo Kang

Dear Match Book,

I like to read nonfiction books that have been turned into movies. I don’t care which order I encounter them in: If I read the book first, I like to follow up with the movie to see how the filmmakers streamlined the plot, but I’ll also go from movie to book. (I recently watched “A Civil Action,” then found the book by Jonathan Harr at a used-book store.)

I’m rarely disappointed by the literary counterparts, one exception being “Julie and Julia,” by Julie Powell — I far preferred the film.

I’ve read Terry Ryan’s memoir, “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio,” which I thought was superb, but I haven’t seen the movie yet. I enjoyed both versions of Erich von Däniken’s classic “Chariots of the Gods” (I watched the movie first).

I recently picked up “The Monuments Men,” by Robert M. Edsel, since I have already seen the film. 

I’m also looking forward to reading and watching “The Radium Girls,” by Kate Moore, as well as to tackling both page and screen versions of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” by Rebecca Skloot.

Read more... 

Source: New York Times

How to Read 80ish Books a Year (And Actually Remember Them) | Level Up - GQ.com

Originally published by GQ US

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Plus: how to take better notes, and why you should quit bad books, summarizes Clay Skipper, Staff Writer — GQ.

Photo: gettyimages

Reading is a skill that once you’ve learned, you probably don’t spend much time trying to get better at. (Not all that different from, say, breathing.) And yet, many of us don’t have to look far to see signs that there’s plenty of room for improvement. We only read at the end of the day—and only for the three minutes between cracking open a book and falling asleep. We’re halfway through about nine books. And our bookshelves are littered with titles that we remember reading but don’t exactly remember anything about..

Shane Parrish is not one of us. He cannot afford to read at a lackluster level. His site Farnam Street has become immensely popular largely because of his ability to mine a deep library for ideas that will help “you develop an understanding of how the world really works, make better decisions, and live a better life.” What does that mean?

It also means that Parrish is uniquely suited to give you some actionable advice on how to optimize your reading—to read more, to get more out of that reading, and, most importantly, to give you permission to quit those five or six books you started and really don’t want to finish.
Read more... 

Source: GQ.com via Pocket.

These 2 life-changing books will train your brain for success | Success - CNBC Make It

"Learning to shift our mindset of how we see the world can make the ultimate difference" says Simon Sinek, Contributor - CNBC Make It. 

Simon Sinek
Globoforce Limited (2018)

As an unshakable optimist, Simon Sinek has many ideas about how we, as a society, can build a brighter future together.

Those ideas have inspired him to do many things. For starters, he's written books — a lot of them. His best-sellers include "Start With Why" ( Tony Robbin's staple book for when he needs inspiration), "Leaders Eat Last," "Together is Better" and "Find Your Why." Sinek's new book, "The Infinite Game," will be released in June 2019. And his 2009 TED Talk about how great leaders inspire action rose to become the third most-watched talk of all time on TED.com.

Sinek says he wouldn't have been inspired to do any of those things if it weren't for books. There are two in particular that he calls life-changing: "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl and "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse.

In his own words, Sinek explains why:
Read more...

Source: CNBC Make It

Mathematician finds balance and beauty in math | Mathematics - MIT News

Jennifer Chu, covers mechanical engineering, mathematics, physics, aeronautics, astronautics, and earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences as a writer for the MIT News Office inform, Zhiwei Yun seeks to connect seemingly disparate fields in mathematics.

On mentoring graduate students, Yun says that “every student has their own taste, and finds problems that interest themselves, and I encourage this. That should make the transition from student to researcher more smooth.”
Photo: Bryce Vickmark

Since he was a child growing up in Changzhou, China, Zhiwei Yun’s appetite for mathematics was nothing but linear, growing with each year as he absorbed lessons and solved increasingly difficult problems, both in the classroom and on his own time, with a zeal that can only come from finding one’s true passion.  

But when Yun was a graduate student, he felt his trajectory come up short. In his third year, he was in a panic as he faced for the first time the difference between learning established mathematics and discovering new math as a researcher.

But his advisor Bob MacPherson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, kept encouraging him to find his own way, saying “only a problem found by yourself can really interest and drive you to the final solution.”..

After graduation, Yun headed to Princeton University to pursue a PhD in pure mathematics. When he did eventually land on a thesis topic, it was in representation theory, a branch of mathematics that seeks to represent abstract algebraic structures in concrete terms such as matrices or symmetries of shapes.

Representation theory plays a crucial role in the Langlands program, a series of associated conjectures devised by mathematician Robert Langlands, that seeks to connect the seemingly disparate fields of number theory and geometry. The Langlands program is considered one of the biggest projects in modern mathematical research, and Yun continues to work in the field of representation theory, with a focus on the Langlands program.
Read more...

Source: MIT News

A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be an artist | Intelligent Machines - MIT Technology Review

Creativity is, and always will be, a human endeavor, insist Sean Dorrance Kelly, philosophy professor at Harvard. 

Photo: COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

On March 31, 1913, in the Great Hall of the Musikverein concert house in Vienna, a riot broke out in the middle of a performance of an orchestral song by Alban Berg. Chaos descended. Furniture was broken. Police arrested the concert’s organizer for punching Oscar Straus, a little-remembered composer of operettas. Later, at the trial, Straus quipped about the audience’s frustration. The punch, he insisted, was the most harmonious sound of the entire evening. History has rendered a different verdict: the concert’s conductor, Arnold Schoenberg, has gone down as perhaps the most creative and influential composer of the 20th century.

You may not enjoy Schoenberg’s dissonant music, which rejects conventional tonality to arrange the 12 notes of the scale according to rules that don’t let any predominate. But he changed what humans understand music to be. This is what makes him a genuinely creative and innovative artist. Schoenberg’s techniques are now integrated seamlessly into everything from film scores and Broadway musicals to the jazz solos of Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman.

Creativity is among the most mysterious and impressive achievements of human existence. But what is it?...

Some mathematicians are like musical virtuosos: they are distinguished by their fluency in an existing idiom. But geniuses like Srinivasa Ramanujan, Emmy Noether, and Alexander Grothendieck arguably reshaped mathematics just as Schoenberg reshaped music. Their achievements were not simply proofs of long-standing hypotheses but new and unexpected forms of reasoning, which took hold not only on the strength of their logic but also on their ability to convince other mathematicians of the significance of their innovations. A notional AI that comes up with a clever proof to a problem that has long befuddled human mathematicians is akin to AlphaGo and its variants: impressive, but nothing like Schoenberg.
Read more...

Source: MIT Technology Review

This Perpetual Calendar Hidden in an Italian Chapel Is a Mathematical Marvel | Stories - Atlas Obscura

The 19th-century device accurately tracks 4,000 years with nine cylinders and a crank, as Atlas Obscura reports.
 

The Perpetual Calendar tracks 4,000 years with nine rolls and a hand-operated crank.
Photo: Ranna Utida

A very early computer, quite unlike any other, is discreetly hanging in the sacristy of a small chapel in the heart of Turin, the beautiful Italian city at the foot of the Alps. Thousands of people pass by every day along Via Garibaldi, one of the main shopping thoroughfares in town, but hardly anyone knows it is there. That is because the tiny baroque jewel that owns the artifact is hidden in plain sight, and the church only opens on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings for mass. Still, anyone in-the-know or curious enough to find it will be awestruck by the Perpetual Calendar of Giovanni Antonio Amedeo Plana.

Built by the astronomer and mathematician in 1831, the Perpetual Calendar took 10 years to complete, from planning to assembly. The device, which resides in the Chapel of Bankers and Merchants, operates via a simple wooden crank under the adorned golden frame, a crank that hides a stunningly accurate universal mechanical calculator spanning the years 1 to 4,000. Want to know the day of the week that the Western Roman Empire fell to the barbarians, on September 4, 476? The calendar will tell you that it was a Monday. Or maybe the phase of the moon on the day you were born? Or the date of Easter a thousand years from now (April 18, 3019)? All of this information can be accessed by a pre-internet machine made of fragile wood and paper, and communicated through 46,000 little numbers carefully arranged around nine cylinders. Each of these is linked to a central one—the only adjustable part of the device—where the user can input the year. That cylinder synchronously regulates all the others through gears and chains...

Details of how the device actually works were more or less a secret until very recently. Plana, for all his assiduousness, did not leave any written material describing the mechanism inside. So in 2015 the prestigious Polytechnic University of Turin challenged its students to parse the algorithm that governs the machine. Four teams responded to the call. “This challenge has shown itself a useful way of valorizing the territory, proposing the use of engineering disciplines to improve the fruition of cultural goods,” the university’s vice dean of research, Enrico Macii, said in a statement at the time.

Read more... 

Source: Atlas Obscura

Inside mathematician Cédric Villani’s plan to make France an AI leader | Siliconrepublic.com

Celebrated mathematician Cédric Villani has been tasked by the French government to create a national AI strategy, notes Ellen Tannam is a writer covering all manner of business and tech subjects.

Cédric Villani.
Photo: J Barande/Ecole polytechnique/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

AI is a competitive field and various global regions are competing to be at the very edge of innovation in the space. French president Emmanuel Macron is keen for the country and Europe to be leaders in artificial intelligence (AI) and he has appointed mathematician Cédric Villani to lead the charge.

Discussing his role with Bloomberg, Villani explained: “There is a deficit of contact between science and politics. It’s part of my job to reinforce that link. It will be France’s role to lead the rest of Europe.”

An accomplished academic 
Villani has a storied academic career, having taught at institutions such as Georgia Tech, the University of California Berkeley and Princeton University. In 2010, he received the Fields Medal for his work on Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation.

In a 150-page report published in 2018, the mathematician outlined a series of sectors to work on to secure a place for France as an AI leader: healthcare, security, transport and defence...

According to Wired, the French government is implementing about 95pc of his recommendations, but Villani said there is still a lot to do to make the lofty ambitions a reality. He said: “We’re currently very far from these goals. It’s going to take very voluntarist actions.”
Read more... 

Source: Siliconrepublic.com

Big data is being reshaped thanks to 100-year-old ideas about geometry | Science + Technology - The Conversation - UK

Photo: Ittay Weiss

Techniques from topology can help us understand DNA and improve drug development, explains Ittay Weiss,  Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Portsmouth.
 

Photo: Elesey/Shutterstock

Your brain is made up of billions of neurons connected by trillions of synapses. And how they’re arranged gives rise to the brain’s functionality and to your personality. That’s why scientists in Switzerland recently produced the first-ever digital 3D brain cell atlas, a complete mapping of the brain of a mouse. While this is a colossal achievement, the great challenge now lies in learning to decipher the atlas. And it’s a huge one.

Science is full of this kind of problem: how to turn large amounts of information into useful insight. For many years, researchers relied on mathematics and statistics to explore data. The explosion of large datasets created by digital storage, the internet, and cheap sensors has led to the development of new techniques designed specifically to deal with this “big data”.

And now there is an emerging new approach based on century-old ideas that’s producing superior tools for understanding certain types of big data. Using the mouse’s brain as an example, its physical shape determines its functionality. But a precise description of this shape, which we now have, doesn’t automatically reveal everything about how the brain works. 

Behind the physical shape lies a more abstract shape formed by the interconnections within the brain. Capturing aspects of this shape by applying techniques from the study of what’s known as “topology” can help reveal a deeper understanding of the brain’s functioning. This same guiding principle of using topological techniques on big data also has applications in drug development and other cutting-edge endeavours...

Millions of years ago, evolution was confronted with a similar problem. DNA in cells is a molecule composed of two coiled up chains. Each chain is a very long wire, built up from a sequence of small molecules called nucleobases. When a cell divides, these wires unwind, replicate and then coil up again. But just like wires in a bag, the strands of DNA can become tangled, which prevents the cell from dividing and causes it to die.
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Source: The Conversation - UK 

A mathematical formula for sharing fair and square | Science - The Irish Times

Photo: Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Even the naming of the Thue-Morse sequence is about fair play, says Peter Lynch, emeritus professor at UCD School of Mathematics & Statistics – he blogs at thatsmaths.com.

Sequencing is important in sports: penalty shoot-outs in football, service order in tennis tie-breaks and choice of colour in chess matches.
Photo: Clive Rose/Getty Images

It is common practice in science to name important advances after the first discoverer or inventor. However, this process often goes awry. A humorous principle called Stigler’s Law holds that no scientific result is named after its original discoverer.

This law was formulated by Prof Stephen Stigler of the University of Chicago in his publication “Stigler’s law of eponymy”. He pointed out that his “law” had been proposed by others before him so it was, in a sense, self-verifying. 

The Calculus Wars

Occasionally, mathematical inventions are made simultaneously by more than one person. Perhaps the greatest example is the formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Jason Bardi, The Calculus Wars. The conflict between British and European mathematicians raged for decades before joint credit for independent discovery was accepted.

The Calculus Wars

The ensuing controversy over priority was described in a book by Jason Bardi, The Calculus Wars. The conflict between British and European mathematicians raged for decades before joint credit for independent discovery was accepted.

 

Axel Thue (1863-1922) and Marston Morse (1892-1977)

A remarkable numerical sequence that has been discovered several times by different mathematicians in different circumstances illustrates Stigler’s Law. It was originally called the Morse sequence when, in 1921, it was popularised by the American mathematician Marston Morse, who applied it in differential geometry. Today, it is usually called the Thue-Morse sequence: the Norwegian mathematician Axel Thue discovered the sequence while studying “combinatorics” on words; this was in 1906, well before Morse. But, more recently, the name Prouhet has been prefixed to the title of the sequence, which was first studied by Eugène Prouhet in 1851...

But what use is the Thue-Morse sequence? It arises in a remarkably wide variety of contexts. It is valuable in number theory, combinatorics, computer graphics, fractal geometry and equitable sharing. Let’s look at the last of these.

Read more... 

Source: The Irish Times  

Top 10 Greatest Mathematicians Of All Time: Check Them Out | Science - ValueWalk

Here are Vikas Shukla, technology reporter at Value Walk's list of top 10 Greatest Mathematicians Of All Time below.
 

Photo: geralt / Pixabay

Mathematics has been around for thousands of years, and several mathematics geniuses have contributed to the field with their revolutionary discoveries that changed the world. It is at the core of almost every aspect of our lives including satellites, computers, medicines, astronomy, and advanced technologies. Here we are going to take a look at the top 10 greatest mathematicians of all time based on their contributions to the field.

Top 10 greatest mathematicians Dozens of mathematicians have made revolutionary contributions to the field of mathematics. So, it’s pretty tricky to pick the top 10 and leave many other legends out. Muhammad Al-Khowarizmi invented algebra; Aryabhatta discovered zero; John Von Neumann gave the Von Neumann architecture; and Paul Erdos published about 1,500 papers. We believe these are the top 10 greatest mathematicians.
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Source: ValueWalk