Books like How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

01

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman · Psychology

Thinking, Fast and Slow is Daniel Kahneman's account of the two cognitive systems that govern human thought.

A kindred science read.

02

The Signal and the Noise

Nate Silver · Science

Nate Silver made his reputation predicting baseball statistics and then political elections.

Both dig into probability.

03

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data

David Spiegelhalter · Science

David Spiegelhalter is one of Britain's most prominent statisticians, and this book is his attempt to translate statistical thinking for a general audience without dumbing it down.

Both dig into critical thinking.

04

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths · Psychology

Brian Christian is a writer and Tom Griffiths is a cognitive scientist, and together they argue that computer science has worked out rigorous solutions to many of the problems humans face every day — when to stop searching for a better option, how to manage your schedule, how to sort your memory — and that these solutions are both interesting and useful.

A kindred science read.

05

Our Mathematical Universe

Max Tegmark · Science

Our Mathematical Universe is Max Tegmark's argument for what he calls the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis: the bold claim that the universe is not merely described by mathematics but is a mathematical structure.

Both dig into mathematics.

06

A Rulebook for Arguments

Anthony Weston · Philosophy

A Rulebook for Arguments is Anthony Weston's slim, widely assigned handbook on how to build and judge arguments.

Shares logic and critical thinking with How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking.

07

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning

Aleksandrov, Kolmogorov & Lavrent'ev · Science

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning is a three-volume survey of mathematics compiled by a group of eminent Soviet mathematicians, originally published in Russian in 1956 and translated into English by the American Mathematical Society in 1963.

Shares mathematics and logic with How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking.

08

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

Peter L. Bernstein · History

Against the Gods is Peter Bernstein's intellectual history of how humanity learned to measure, quantify, and manage risk — a story he traces from ancient gambling in the Mediterranean through the development of modern probability theory, statistics, and financial derivatives.

Shares mathematics and probability with How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking.

09

The Great Mental Models

Shane Parrish · Self-help

The Great Mental Models is the first volume in Shane Parrish's series drawn from his Farnam Street blog, which he built into one of the most widely read sites on thinking and decision-making.

Shares critical thinking and reasoning with How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking.

10

Chaos: Making a New Science

James Gleick · Science

Chaos: Making a New Science, published in 1987, tells the story of how a loose network of scientists working across meteorology, mathematics, biology, and physics in the 1960s and 1970s developed chaos theory — the study of systems that are deterministic but unpredictable because tiny differences in initial conditions produce wildly different outcomes.

Both dig into mathematics.

11

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.

12

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.