Books like Is God a Mathematician?

01

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking · Science

A Brief History of Time is Stephen Hawking's attempt to explain the biggest questions in physics — where the universe came from, how it behaves, and where it might be going — to readers with no scientific training.

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

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.

04

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.

05

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics

Timothy Gowers · Science

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is a reference work unlike most reference works: it is meant to be read, not just consulted.

Shares mathematics and history of mathematics with Is God a Mathematician?.

06

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.

07

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.

08

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.

09

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.

10

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.

Both dig into mathematics.

11

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

Sean Carroll · Science

The Big Picture is physicist Sean Carroll's attempt to do something genuinely ambitious: build a coherent worldview from the ground up, starting from the laws of physics and working outward through chemistry, biology, consciousness, and ultimately meaning.

Both dig into philosophy of science.

12

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

Simon Singh · Science

Simon Singh's The Code Book traces the history of cryptography from Caesar's cipher through the breaking of Enigma to the mathematics of public-key encryption and the looming possibility of quantum cryptography.

Both dig into mathematics.