Books like Chaos: Making a New Science

01

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick · Science

The Information traces the history of information — as a concept, a technology, and a way of understanding the universe — from the talking drums of West Africa through the telegraph, the printing press, the telephone, and into the digital age.

A kindred science read.

02

The Elegant Universe

Brian Greene · Science

The Elegant Universe is Brian Greene's attempt to bring string theory — one of the most mathematically demanding ideas in modern physics — within reach of general readers.

A kindred science read.

03

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson · Science

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's attempt to understand the scientific story of everything — from the Big Bang to the emergence of modern humans — by spending three years talking to scientists and reading science history.

A kindred science read.

04

The Second Machine Age

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee · Economics

The Second Machine Age is Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's argument that digital technology has entered a qualitatively new phase — one in which machines can perform cognitive tasks previously reserved for humans, creating economic disruption and opportunity simultaneously.

A kindred science read.

05

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

James Gleick · Biography

Genius is James Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who developed quantum electrodynamics, cracked safes at Los Alamos, played bongo drums in bars, and became the twentieth century's most celebrated scientific personality.

A kindred science read.

06

The Checklist Manifesto

Atul Gawande · Health

The Checklist Manifesto is Atul Gawande's argument that the single most underused tool for preventing catastrophic failure in complex fields is also the simplest: a well-designed checklist.

Shares complexity and systems with Chaos: Making a New Science.

07

Climbing Mount Improbable

Richard Dawkins · Science

Climbing Mount Improbable is Richard Dawkins's response to the persistent intuition that complex biological structures — the vertebrate eye, insect wings, spider webs — are too improbable to have evolved by chance.

Both dig into complexity.

08

Deep Learning

Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville · Science

Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville is the standard graduate-level textbook on the mathematical and computational foundations of deep neural networks.

Both dig into mathematics.

09

Fermat's Enigma

Simon Singh · Science

In 1637, Pierre de Fermat scrawled a note in the margin of a mathematics book claiming to have found a proof that no three positive integers can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than 2 — but that the margin was too narrow to contain it.

Both dig into mathematics.

10

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

Suzanne Simard · Science

Suzanne Simard is the forest ecologist who discovered that trees communicate and share resources through underground mycorrhizal fungal networks — the research that gave rise to the concept of the "mother tree" and, at several removes, Peter Wohlleben's popular writing on the subject.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

11

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

Jordan Ellenberg · Science

Jordan Ellenberg is a research mathematician who writes as if mathematics is something you would want to think about over dinner.

Both dig into mathematics.

12

Is God a Mathematician?

Mario Livio · Science

Mario Livio is an astrophysicist who has spent decades studying galaxies and supernovae, and who has been persistently haunted by a question that comes up whenever mathematics meets physics: why does abstract math, invented centuries before anyone knew it would be needed, keep turning out to perfectly describe physical reality?

Both dig into mathematics.