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Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning (Dover Books on Mathematics)

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5.0 out of 5 stars The model book, May 8, 2013

By

N N Taleb “Nassim N Taleb”

This review is from: Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning (Dover Books on Mathematics) (Paperback)

There is something admirable about the school of the Russians: they are thinkers doing math, with remarkable clarity, minimal formalism, and total absence of unnecessary pedantry one finds in more modern texts (in the post Bourbaki era). This is of course surprising as one would have expected the exact opposite from the products of the communist era. Mathematicians should be using this book as a model for their own composition. You can read it and reread it. Professors should assign this in addition to modern texts, as readers can get intutions, something alas absent from modern texts.

HatTip to Dave Lull
via Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning (Dover Books on Mathematics).

N Taleb’s review of Models. Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life

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Here is what I wrote in my endorsement: Emanuel Derman has written my kind of a book, an elegant combination of memoir, confession, and essay on ethics, philosophy of science and professional practice. He convincingly establishes the difference between model and theory and shows why attempts to model financial markets can never be genuinely scientific. It vindicates those of us who hold that financial modeling is neither practical nor scientific. Exceedingly readable.

From the remarks here, people seem to be blaming Derman for not having written the type of books they usually read… They are blaming him for being original! This is very philistinic. This book is a personal essay; if you don’t like it, don’t read it, there is no need to blame the author for not delivering your regular science reporting. Why don’t you go blame Montaigne for discussing his personal habits in the middle of a meditation on war inspired by Plutarch?

via Amazon.com: N N Taleb “Nassim N Taleb”‘s review of Models.Behaving.Badly.: Why Confusing Illu….

Junglies’ review of Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder Amazon.com

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Infuriating? The breakneck speed with which the reader engages the book reminds me of the scene in 2001 where the astronaught is propelled through the star gate. As he moves forward everything is changing around him and he is awestruck by the carnival of lights until he finds himself in a somewhat recognisable room but still changes come. Essentially what I am saying is that there is so much a reader can take at any time and the book is a Pandora’s Box, a treasure trove of ideas that it is very hard to absorb all of them as you read.

via Amazon.com: Junglies’ review of Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.

The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick: Benoit Mandelbrot

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NNT reviews The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick
HatTip to Hristo Vassilev & Dave Lull

“I have never done anything like others”, Mandelbrot once said. And indeed these memoirs show it. He really managed to do everything on his own terms. Everything. It was not easy for him, but he end up doing it as he wanted it.

Consider his huge insight about the world around us. “Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line”, wrote Benoit Mandelbrot, contradicting more than 2000 years of misconceptions. Triangles, squares, and circles seem to exist in our textbooks more than reality—and we didn’t notice it. Thus was born fractal geometry, a general theory of “roughness”. Mandelbrot uncovered simple rules used by nature and men that, thanks to repetition, by smaller parts that resemble the whole, generate these seemingly complex and chaotic patterns.

Self-taught and fiercely independent, he thought in images and passed the entrance exam of the top school of mathematics without solving equations; he was both precocious and a late bloomer producing the famous “Mandelbrot set” when he was in his fifties and got tenure at Yale when he was 75. Older mathematicians have resisted his geometric and intuitive method—but the top prize in mathematics was recently given for solving one of his sub-conjectures…

via The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick: Benoit Mandelbrot: 9780307377357: Amazon.com: Books.

AMAZON & THE TRUTHFULNESS of THE AMATEUR

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AMAZON & THE TRUTHFULNESS of THE AMATEUR

When The Black Swan came out, the first NYT reviewer Gregg Easterbrook, a professional journalist was clueless and had not read the book nor did he understand much of it… Same with other reviews by academics who skimmed the book and found some angle that links it to what research tradition they knew worse, academics tend to be envious of other writers as I can predict a review from the name of its author … Professionals cut corners and work from secondary sources or within agendas and scan books for familiarity with prevailing concepts; so it took a while for the real ideas of TBS to percolate. Because of the journalistic distortions people believed my book was about forecasting Black Swans, etc., not about epistemic opacity and perceptional distortions etc.This time, 5 3/4 years later Amazon sent the galleys of the new book to members of the VINE program for trusted and genuine readers who review books for free. They can get things wrong, but the crowdsourcing works, supplying both DEPTH and VARIATIONS of opinions, provided such advanced reviewing is limited to those who are deemed reliable by their ratings.
And the author can respond on premises.
This insulates us authors from corrupt & paid laborers: academics & journalists.

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