The best Science & Mathematics books: Reddit reviews

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Long answer is here

Short answer is "stop whining and learn while you still can"

Regards,

Someone who didn't

I highly recommend the book <em>Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers</em> by Mary Roach. Really interesting look into the all the interesting stuff that can happen to your body after death - from typical mortuary stuff like this to organ donation to scientific research.

It's a really good read.

I just recently read "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" and among other things covers just this. Good book, would recommend.

I'm surprised this comment isn't higher. Funerals are extremely expensive and it seems like such a useless expense. I get it that it's for the surviving family, not for the deceased, but up to $10,000 to get together around a casket and say goodbye?

I'm originally from a country where the cost of cremation are very, very affordable (and subsidized by the government because everyone's poor and there has to be a way to handle remains that doesn't involve poor people scrambling to find a nonexistent place in a cemetery). The first time someone explained the cost of US funeral I nearly choked on my coffee.

Even that bare-bones cremation, directly through a crematory is about $1000 plus oftentimes transportation costs. It's not high enough to require insurance, but also maybe not enough for family to cover easily without going into debt.

I have a list of local universities that accept bodies as anatomical gifts for when I kick the bucket and after reading Mary Roach's Stiff about all the things that can be done with cadavers, I've made it clear to my whole family that they should do their best to donate my remains to the military for a blast tests.

He can get a used copy of the Fundamentals of Astrodynamics on Amazon for just $16.95

I had a highschool math teacher who always told us to be warry of statistics and even had a book he shared.

How to Lie with Statistics https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393310728/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_mfP4DbK80WD65

The texts by Stewart and Larson are the two most common introductions to calculus, and both are fantastic. Calculus is such a powerful tool that you don't need to worry about tailoring it to one field. Just as addition and multiplication will be used by economists and physicists alike, so will integration and differentiation.

A couple years ago a coworker turned me onto a book he coauthored, <u>Concrete Mathematics</u>. Absolute must read/reference if you write a lot of math-y code.

Smart-aleck reviews for the book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates Paperback from Amazon and Goodreads:

> I bought two copies of this book. I find that the first copy perfectly predicts what the numbers will be in the second copy. I feel cheated.

and

> "A Million Random Digits"? HA! They only used 10, and just kept repeating them in different combinations! Don't be fooled!

and finally

> After reading the book a while I started seeing a pattern. I did extensive research to prove my theory. After hours of mathematical modeling I conclusively proved that there is a set of numbers in this book that it not only a pattern, but is outright sequential!

> The top corner of each page (left corner on the left side pages, right corner of the right side pages) was a list of sequential numbers from 1 to 628, all in a row. No numbers are skipped. Even the prime numbers are included! At first you don't notice this because there is only 1 number on each page. But as you advance through the book you notice that the numbers keep advancing by 1 every time you turn the page.

A million random digits.

I recommend both! For Stiff, I advise getting the audiobook version. It's very well done. The book itself is not any more graphic than it needs to be and is respectful (although I did take issue with the author's apparent negative view of cosmetic surgery in an early chapter.) I found the whole thing fascinating. I was actually most fascinated though when she got to the chapter about the possibility of human head transplants. Here's the page on Amazon.

As for A Dog's Purpose, I messed up and accidentally failed to notice there was an Audible version until literally just now, so I can't attest to the quality of the reading. But the book itself (as stated, I'm only half way through) is really good. Here it is.

Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual - It gives you an overview of what classes of problems exist and how real world problems can be expressed as instances of them. It doesn't always give you the step-by-step directions of how certain algorithms work, but it gives you enough of an overview to understand the problem and points you towards existing implementations.

It's certainly one of the most useful books I used when preparing for interviews (and comes in handy in the real world as well). As an anecdote, in one interview at a big-N company, I was presented with a problem, said "based on these factors I'd treat this as a network flow problem by doing X", and that was the only buzzword needed - rather than watch me try to write a solution to a known problem, we were able to move on to other questions. Without knowing that term, I probably would have spent the remainder of the interview trying to optimize a solution to the problem instead.

If every republican read how to lie with statistics -Darrell Huff (1954) Fox viewership would drop. Hell, Democrats or anyone for that matter should read this. It makes trusting a news source a lot harder when you immediately pick out devious tricks to engineer partial truths.

Play Kerbal Space Program (seriously). Then pick a book (like this one), it's a much better way to go.

One of the best books I ever read was "How to Lie With Statistics". Although the examples are dated, the basics are still very valid.

Damn, son. That's way bigger than my guesstimate.

The amazon prices I checked out pinned the collection closer to $400, which granted is still really, really impressive.

In case you're curious this was my textbook. It's come down by a lot in price over a couple years. Brand new it was $365 in the shrink wrap from my school's store!

Eh, either way I'm wrong, just by a different amount.

It's not an oxymoron. You can have two sets of true facts about a situation, which depending on which things are emphasized, gives you an entirely separate narrative of how things are going.

One could say, for instance, "Murders in Chicago are up 1200% this year! Highest number of deaths on record!" And that would be one set of facts.

One could also say, "There were 12 murders in Chicago, compared to 1 last year. The 10 year average is about 10 murders per year, so this isn't outside of the expected range of deaths. Also, it's a city of 3 million, so this is in fact a fairly low amount of murders on a per capita basis."

Those are two sets of facts reporting on the same incident, both true but you can tell they paint entirely different narratives about how to feel about the situation.

What this shows is that you cannot simply say, "Well, just report the facts, and everything else will work itself out." There is a meta element to this, where you choose which things to emphasize, and which to de-emphasize, and by this choice of emphasis you inevitably are shaping the way things are understood, because humans understand events not by a bulleted list of facts, but as a narrative, a story.

These things you have to take into consideration when you're talking about media and the spread of information, especially political information.

For more fun like this, check out How to Lie with Statistics.

A lot of times with a course I was studying there was just something I didn't get and it took a while for it to click, then once it did the rest of the course was cake. I had this problem with exterior derivatives. The text we were using didn't introduce or motivate them well so I ended up in the profs office for an hour once and he helped motivate it and after that the course was no problem.

With proofs there's a big jump to get over and often times the profs don't motivate what you're doing really well. I found a good book on proof technique was helpful because it helped me understand what I was reading. It turns out for most undergrad math you can break a proof down into one of a few patterns and once you know the patterns when you're reading a text you know what to look for and recognize the flow of the proof.

This is a good text on the subject

https://www.amazon.com/How-Prove-Structured-Approach-2nd/dp/0521675995

Possibly the worst set of graphs I've ever seen

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https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728

I think a good book that covers that basic mathematics needed to understand and use algorithms is Concrete Mathematics. Some of the problem sets are rather challenging, but you don’t need any special math knowledge to get started. It covers both continuous math topics, as well as dis*crete*. It’s co-written by the algorithms god himself, Donald Knuth.

If you struggle with some algebra concepts, I would also recommend Khan Academy. I’ve used it pretty extensively to brush up on topics I haven’t seen in a while.

https://www.amazon.com/Concrete-Mathematics-Foundation-Computer-Science/dp/0201558025

so need to decide what colleges to apply to

but there are so many colleges out there i'm looking for college match tools

but there are so many college match tools out there that i need a way to find which ones are good & credible

but there are so many articles ranking and comparing college match tools that—

—wait nevermind, i found the perfect resource

I'm 33 and I did not learn coding in school either.

<em>How to Prove It: A Structured Approach, 2nd Edition</em> by Daniel Velleman, is very good. He does reference computer coding, but no background in coding or proofing is required. Literally anyone can pick it up and get started.

Here, you obviously need to read this https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728?ref_=d6k_applink_bb_dls_failed

The fact is that masks were made political and there are politically motivated people funding and doing research. u/Kryloxy is correct that there are studies that show masks are somewhat useful and a bunch that show they aren't. I think the best summary of this whole situation comes from the University of Oxford's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.

"The increasing polarised and politicised views on whether to wear masks in public during the current COVID-19 crisis hides a bitter truth on the state of contemporary research and the value we pose on clinical evidence to guide our decisions...There is considerable uncertainty as to the value of wearing masks. For instance, high rates of infection with cloth masks could be due to harms caused by cloth masks...The numerous systematic reviews that have been recently published all include the same evidence base so unsurprisingly, broadly reach the same conclusions. However, recent reviews using lower quality evidence found masks to be effective...This abandonment of the scientific modus operandi and lack of foresight has left the field wide open for the play of opinions, radical views and political influence."

I hope I'm not out of line with any assumptions i.make but you NEED a solid understanding of discrete mathematics. https://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Susanna-Epp/dp/0495391328 cover most of what you need. For data structures and algorithms this open source free course beats any online course I have seen yet AND covers all of what most colleges need: https://opendsa-server.cs.vt.edu/home/books

> The actual shame here is Newsweek reporting on that tiny slope at the end of the graph.

My business statistics teacher in college was garbage, but the best thing he ever did was mandate that we buy the book, How To Lie With Statistics as one of the textbooks.

It's a short book, written in 1954, and yet it is remarkably applicable to today. It goes through the most common ways advertisers, politicians, salespeople, etc use misleading graphs or charts or cherry-picked statistics to lie. And once you've read it, you notice it EVERYWHERE.

I would recommend the book "How To Prove It".

https://www.amazon.com/How-Prove-Structured-Approach-2nd/dp/0521675995

It helped me in my transition into proof based mathematics. It will teach common techniques used in proofs and provides a bunch of practice problems as well.

But what is your response to my comments?

Also, who are the "experts" who published the diagram. Finally, go read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728

How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff

It's a pretty quick read about how true information can be used in misleading ways.

Well, the example you posted would be covered indeed by a course on discrete math. Are you familiar with induction and inductive proofs? I can recommend going over Concrete Mathematics. That book should put you well over what's needed for algos and data structures

Ah, the Bible of Algorithms. It's a good reference but never understood why many professors use it as an introductory textbook when it assumes some previous knowledge despite saying otherwise. The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena offers better explanations along with a short intro on math notation but might still be problematic without any background. Schaum's Outline of Discrete Mathematics has a good overview of discrete math with lots of practice problems. Other than that it might be difficult finding a good book since they tend to be all over the place on what they consider 'discrete math'.