Personal :: Books

$ Last modified: Mon Dec 15 22:45:27 EST 2003 $

I enjoy reading books, especially biographies of mathematicians, scientists or engineers . Following is a partial list of books (and my personal ratings) that I have read with a great joy and excitement for the last few years, all of which are, one way or the other, somewhat related to the "Science".

"If it's green, it's biology, If it stinks, it's chemistry, If it has numbers, it's math, If it doesn't work, it's technology." -- Unknown

(Note: All images below are taken from either Amazon.com or Aladdin.com and thus their properties)

Book Title and Author Rating (1 - 5)
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman 5
Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer 5
Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists by Cathy A. Lazere, Dennis Elliott Shasha 3
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn 3
Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh, John Lynch 5
A BEAUTIFUL MIND: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994 by Sylvia Nasar 4
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner 4
Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi 4
Small Worlds by Duncan J. Watts 3
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin 5
Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture by Apostolos K. Doxiades 4
I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould 4
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Phillips Feynman 4
Godel's Proof by Ernest Nagel, James Roy Newman, Douglas R. Hofstadter 4
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel 3
Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams 2
Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey by Jane Goodall 4
The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel 3
Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Torvalds, David Diamond 3
Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel 3
Strange Brains and Genius : The Secret Lives Of Eccentric Scientists And Madmen by Clifford A. Pickover 3