Books!

January 13, 2008

Yay books! I am such a nerd. =) Here’s a list of the books I (or I and my wife) received for Christmas and my birthday:

Categories for the Working Mathematician Categories for the Working Mathematician, Saunders Mac Lane

I’ve picked up lots of little bits of category theory here and there just from hanging out in the #haskell IRC channel, reading various papers, etc., but I decided I need to learn it formally for myself. I’ve already started this one, it’s pretty dense but I’m enjoying it so far.

Types and Programming Languages Types and Programming Languages, Benjamin C. Pierce

This is the area I’m interested in doing research in, so I’m trying to get a leg up on some of the fundamentals before I start grad school. It seems like a really great book so far (I’m on chapter 11 or something like that).

The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 2: Generating All Tuples and Permutations The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicles 2 and 4, Donald E. Knuth

w00t! Knuth rocks.

Inversions Inversions, Scott Kim

Scott Kim’s mathematically-influenced word art is amazing.

Exercises in Visual Thinking Proofs without Words: Exercises in Visual Thinking, Roger B. Nelson

This is a neat book full of visual proofs. Hopefully it can provide me with some interesting material for my other blog.

Nature's Greatest Secret The Golden Section: Nature’s Greatest Secret, Scott Olsen

Ditto for this one. Also, Wooden Books (the publisher) makes really beautiful books — you can tell they pay a lot of attention to things like typesetting, layout, and materials.

Flight, Volume OneFlight, Volume Three Flight, Volumes 1 and 3, Various (Kazu Kibuishi, ed.)

I can’t say I am some huge graphic novel fan or anything, but I really like these collections of graphic-novel-short-stories.

An Indian History of the American West Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Dee Brown

Got this one from my uncle, who always gives us interesting books. This one looks difficult, but interesting and important. I’m really looking forward to reading it in that this-probably-won’t-be-fun-but-it-will-be-good sort of way.


Type theory, here I come…

December 26, 2007

For Christmas my parents got me a copy of Types and Programming Languages. w00t! I started reading it today on the subway coming home from work. Unfortunately I’m kind of anal about reading prefaces, introductions and so on, so I haven’t gotten to any actual substance yet. Tomorrow probably. Now I can finally put into a coherent, rigorous framework all the little bits of knowledge about type systems I’ve picked up here and there… =)

Also, last call for submissions to the Carnival of Mathematics! I’ll be posting it at midnight Thursday/Friday (or possibly early Friday morning), so it would be great to get submissions by 2pm tomorrow.