The Garden of the Blind

A couple of years ago, I was given a $50 Borders gift card (Borders is a trendy bookstore, along the lines of Barnes and Noble, but with CDs and DVDs too). This week, I finally got around to matching the card up with my wish list, and got three books that somehow say “nerdy”. Actually, I went in looking for books on math, and almost picked up a collection by Martin Gardner (and the 3rd season of The Simpsons, but their DVDs are horribly overpriced), but instead got three books from other parts of the store that are about math anyway.

First, I got the number one book from my list: “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas R. Hofstadter. It was in the section on Western Philosophy. It’s about the compelling patterns that appear in the work of these three individuals, as well as anywhere else in life, although from the introduction, it seems that it defies description by anybody but the author.

Next came “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” by Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman, found in the Physics section (one shelf over from the math books). It’s a collection of anecdotes by one of the most compelling and interesting figures in theoretical physics in the last century. For the record, I already own “A History of π” by Petr Beckman and “Men of Mathematics” by Eric T. Bell, so technical biographies and history books aren’t a new thing.

Finally, I passed up on “The Prime Obsession” (about Reimann’s hypothesis) for “The Code Book” by Simon Singh (who you may remember from “Fermat’s Enigma” which told of Andrew Wiles and the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture). This book, best summed up by its subtitle, “The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography”, was found in the Espionage shelf of their Western History section.

I can’t say how excited I am about the Hofstadter book, and the others strike me as a fun read too. I’m looking forward to reading them, but I’ve got an overdue library book (“Time Travel and Other Mathematical Bewilderments” by Martin Gardner) to finish first.