Books

This is often referred to as DFW's magnum opus. I tried reading it last year but did not get very far. I am going to try again. Apparently, it's a Plan II rite of passage.

This book was recommended to me by my Plan II Junior Seminar professor. It analyzes each of the eighty-five essays comprising The Federalist Papers through a modern (2015) lens.

One of my big takeaways is that I think any political theory that doesn't engage with human behavior is necessarily suspect. On that count, The Federalist deserves a lot of credit for trying. Granted, much of their analysis is either wrong or outdated, but at least they try to account for human behavior. So it should at least impel us to first obtain a more accurate understanding of how we behave and then reason the politics from there.

The book was also interesting because it seems to be a more true "originalism" in that it gets straight into the heads of the founders. It essentially refutes most of the strange and regressive "originalism" peddled today.

EDIT: Over the 2021-22 winter break, I finally re-read all the way through chapter six. I did most of the problems and proved many of the theorems from the first five chapters. Bolzano Bourbaki was indeed correct, as this careful self-study was incredibly helpful for sharpening my real analysis intuition. I'll probably revisit the book at some point, but for now I'm satisfied with what I've gotten from it.

Review is embedded within this blog post.

The first half is Smullyan's usual bag of tricks, with logic puzzles and knights and knaves and other truth-tellers and liars. I worked out almost all of the problems, and I especially enjoyed trying to solve the meta-puzzles in my head.

As usual, Smullyan spends the second half developing some interesting concept from mathematical logic by weaving it into a narrative. This time, we explore various forests and learn about combinatory logic (not to be confused with combinatorial logic), with different types of birds in each forest representing different combinators. The final chapters cover the fixed-point principle, propositional logic, arithmetic, and briefly, computability. This was the first Smullyan book where I had the mathematical maturity to appreciate the underlying math concepts and their implications.

A short little book on Maxwell's equations in free space and matter. The book expects (alternatively, it is helpful to have) some familiarity with vector calculus, Coulomb's law, and basic electrostatics, but otherwise, the author breaks down and then builds up Maxwell's equations in a very manageable format. The book was recommended to me by a professor, and I would recommend it to anyone else who wants to solidify their understanding of EM.

I read most of this book and did a handful of exercises. It's a solid first text in abstract algebra, and I went from being spooked by the words group, ring, and field to being moderately comfortable working with them. In addition, I don't have a great linear algebra background (only one community college course that was functionally self-study), so this book did a good job filling in the gaps and adding a bit of depth to my linear algebra knowledge as well.

Incidentally, I was taking a number theory course at the same time I was reading the latter third of this book, so it was amusing to see many of the same number-theoretical definitions and theorems presented in a different manner.

EDIT: I finished everything through chapter five (rigid body equations of motion), understood bits and pieces of chapter six (oscillations), and promptly ran into a brick wall of special relativity. The first five chapters covered roughly the same amount of material as (but in perhaps more depth than) the classical dynamics course I took this semester (fall 2021), so this book both provided strong reinforcement of content and was a solid supplementary source.

I'll eventually revisit the material and read the more advanced chapters, but for now this is a satisfactory outcome. And it was a relatively enjoyable read as well!

An introduction to vector calculus, focusing on the titular vector operators divergence, gradient, and curl. Neat pictorial derivations of these operators in curvilinear coordinates.

Solid textbook, good topic coverage. I read it before taking the circuit theory course my freshman spring, and it prepared me well. My favorite sections were frequency response and transforms (incidentally, we did not spend much/any time on these topics in class, so self-studying them ahead of time was the right move).

I still need to read chapters seven and ten (ran out of gas at the end of the semester). Overall, quite enjoyable. Full review incoming ...

A novel about a man who wakes up unconscious in a spaceship, far, far away from Earth, and has to figure out what is going on (and save Earth in the process). I am a big fan of conflict in the form of man (plus science) vs. environment, and this book did not disappoint. I am now inspired to read The Martian, another one of Andy Weir's books where the main character has a similar relationship with science and a hostile environment.

A fantastic introductory text on signals and systems, covering LTI systems, Fourier series, the time and frequency domains, and the Fourier, Laplace and Z transforms, among other things. I especially liked the chapter on communication systems, which covered amplitude and frequency modulation and demodulation, time-division and frequency-division multiplexing, and a little bit of discrete-time modulation. The final chapter was an introduction to linear feedback and stability, which I also thought was quite interesting.

An autobiographical collection of stories from the life of one of the most successful, famous, and culturally relevant scientists of all time. I was impressed and inspired by his intellectual curiosity and cleverness and penchant for creating and solving puzzles. More importantly, the book provides a template for the kind of person every aspiring scientist should try not to become.

Incredible.

A solid introductory text for freshman physics, especially for self-study. I used this to study for the AP Physics C exams. I thought the problems were fun to work through, and overall it was enjoyable to read.

This was the "required" textbook for the vector calculus course I took my first semester and covered all of the major topics of the course (Taylor's theorem in multiple dimensions and Hessian matrices, Jacobian matrices, Lagrange multipliers, Fubini's theorem, paths, surfaces, and parametrization, vector theorems, and more). While I was reading it, I thought it was okay at best (the writing style was not at all compelling), but now I do reference the book from time to time because the information is at least well-organized. All of the reviews do say it is very dry, so I guess my assessment is not surprising.

My summer reading book before tenth grade. An enjoyable read whose title I snowclone in a recent blog post.

A classic dystopian novel that I enjoyed reading during sophomore year of high school.

Statistical analysis of "conventional wisdom" in baseball, such as hot and cold streaks, platooning and righties and lefties and batting order, pitching rotations and starters and relievers, base-stealing, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks. And of course, the authors of The Book created wOBA (weighted on-base average), a better way to quantify a hitter's performance by considering how a player gets on base (and weighting each event accordingly) rather than naively counting the total number of bases or simply considering whether a player reaches base.

Modern baseball strategy has evolved over the past fifteen years, so some of the analysis is no longer applicable (though perhaps it's even more applicable), but The Book's narration remains interesting and its conclusions are well-presented nonetheless.

I used to be a huge baseball fan and this book motivated much of that interest. The authors rely heavily on Markov chains, which (along with most of the other math in this book) went well above my head at the time. But I recently took my department's probability course, and it was nice to finally fully understand the math behind all of this magic!