Chaos

This isn’t a book about biology, but it makes the list anyway. Genes, chemistry, and mechanics stretch our conception of life. Still, there’s more needed to make sense of it all: the emerging understanding that dynamic interactions, feedback loops, and a bit of randomness make life alive. We need more books that lay this out; this was one of my motivations for writing my book.

Philip Ball’s very recent How Life Works seems masterful, and I’m sure it would make this list if I were writing a month or two later, after I’ve finished reading it. But since I can’t… show more.

My friend Jesse Gilbert handed me his copy of Chaos in 1992 or 1993, shortly after he read it for a college class. “You have to read this book,” he insisted. “I need to talk about it with you.”

Chaos theory, which is the subject of Gleick’s nonfiction book, has become such a dominant trope in global fiction, the popular imagination, and meme culture that younger folks probably don’t realize how completely new this way of thinking was for most of us when the book was first published in 1987.

In the 1980s, science fiction and popular tech narratives were… show more.

This best-seller kicked off the public interest in chaos theory.

I was schooled in traditional Capital Market Theory. However, as a practitioner, I realized that those ideas had serious flaws. Gleick’s book opened my mind to new ideas. This history of the development of chaos theory has an enthusiasm for new ideas that is infectious.

Gleick was also able to introduce these ideas in a way that was easily understandable to the layman. Understanding the ideas is the only way to use them in practical applications. I highly recommend this book to all levels of readers.

This is a book about "non-linear" thinking. I like this kind of weird stuff. 

Research in psychology shows that the human mind struggles to understand non-linear relationships. Our brains seem to like the rather dull and predictable story of simple relationships. Ones like "you drive quicker, you arrive sooner" or maybe "the more books you read, the brainer you become."  But real life is not following these laws! Take dieting: if you eat less food you don't necessarily get thinner - maybe your metabolism slows down instead. Maybe you skip breakfast but start snacking late at night. "It's complicated."