Here are 100 books that The Fractal Murders fans have personally recommended if you like
The Fractal Murders.
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I’m a mathematician and incurable book-lover. It’s been one of the joys of my life to explore the links between mathematics and literature. The stories we tell ourselves about mathematics and mathematicians are fascinating, and especially the ways in which mathematicians are portrayed in fiction. I’m the first female Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London, a role created in 1597. I don’t fit the mathematician stereotype of the dishevelled old man, obsessed only with numbers (well, perhaps I am slightly dishevelled), so I particularly relish books featuring mathematicians who bring more to the party than this. I hope you’ll enjoy my recommended books as much as I did!
This play is a total delight. Read it, of course, and then if it ever comes to a theatre anywhere near you, go see it!
It’s set in 1809 and the present-ish day, and features exuberant mathematical prodigy Thomasina Coverly, who definitely isn’t meant to be Ada Lovelace, says Tom Stoppard (but maybe she is a bit).
The dialogue is like the most invigorating dinner party conversation you ever had: it’s funny, it’s clever, it references fractals, Fermat’s Last Theorem, the silly competitiveness of academia, Lord Byron, landscape gardening, and a million other things. I love it.
In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the '500 acres inclusive of lake' where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the 'picturesque' Gothic style: 'everything but vampires', as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later.
Bernard has arrived to uncover the scandal which is said to have taken place when Lord Byron stayed at Sidley Park.
We are a mother and daughter team of mathematicians (respectively a researcher in mathematics and a math graduate who runs an educational company) and detective novel lovers (with Agatha Christie a firm favorite). We’re also both very passionate about the importance of a good foundational mathematics education for everyone.
Thomasina’s musings in Arcadia lead us naturally to Nova Jacobs’ entertaining mystery: the titular equation is closely linked to Thomasina’s ‘theory of everything’ (in fact, a quote from Arcadia opens one of Jacobs’ chapters). When Isaac suddenly dies of an apparent suicide, his adoptive granddaughter Hazel is left to follow his enigmatic clues to discover where Isaac has hidden the equation he spent the last years of his life working on, what exactly it calculates, and who else is after it.
The best thing about this book is the Severy family, a bunch of mathematicians and theoretical physicists living in a hilariously drawn world of academic pettiness, demanding PhD students, dry periods that seem like they might never end, judgmental relatives, and disappointingly un-academic offspring. Sounds just like our family!
*Wall Street Journal’s “Mysteries: Best of 2018” *Book of the Month Club Selection *Edgar Award Nominee: Best First Novel by an American Author
A “hugely entertaining” (Wall Street Journal) mystery starring “a Royal Tenenbaums-esque clan of geniuses” (Martha Stewart Living)—perfect for fans of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.
In this “riveting…brilliant” (Booklist) debut, Hazel Severy, the owner of a struggling Seattle bookstore, receives a letter from her adoptive grandfather—mathematician Isaac Severy—days after he dies in a suspected suicide. In his puzzling letter, Isaac alludes to a secretive organization that is after his final bombshell equation, and he charges Hazel with safely…
We are a mother and daughter team of mathematicians (respectively a researcher in mathematics and a math graduate who runs an educational company) and detective novel lovers (with Agatha Christie a firm favorite). We’re also both very passionate about the importance of a good foundational mathematics education for everyone.
This energetic mystery is populated by a range of extremely colourful characters from reclusive twin brother mathematicians to disreputable biographers and Belarusian Mafiosi, and it has a suitably hapless narrator to guide us through the mess of murder, stolen mathematical documents and unsavoury rumours.
The final revelation is pretty crude and disappointing but it doesn't matter too much because the book up til there is very great (and very British) fun. There's plenty of mathematical trivia and some discussion of actual maths, including an interesting scene where we get to contrast how two brains - one mathematical and one not - approach a problem.
After a disastrous day at work, disillusioned junior PR executive Tom Winscombe finds himself sharing a train carriage and a dodgy Merlot with George Burgess, biographer of the Vavasor twins, mathematicians Archimedes and Pythagoras, who both died in curious circumstances a decade ago.
Burgess himself will die tonight in an equally odd manner, leaving Tom with a locked case and a lot of unanswered questions.
Join Tom and a cast of disreputable and downright dangerous characters in this witty thriller set in a murky world of murder, mystery and complex equations,…
A historical thriller set in south London just after World War II, as Britain returns to civilian life and the men return home from the fight, causing the women to leave their wartime roles. The South London Hospital for Women and Children is a hospital, (based on a real place)…
We are a mother and daughter team of mathematicians (respectively a researcher in mathematics and a math graduate who runs an educational company) and detective novel lovers (with Agatha Christie a firm favorite). We’re also both very passionate about the importance of a good foundational mathematics education for everyone.
The Three Body Problem is a real-life unsolved math problem concerning the motion of three bodies (think a star and two orbiting planets), all acting on each other by the pull of gravity. Given their positions and movements at times, what will happen in the future? Will they eventually fly away or fall into the star?
The Three Body Problem is also a mathematical mystery by Catherine Shaw (a pen name – shhh), set in Cambridge in Victorian times, which contains three actual dead bodies, all of the mathematicians working on the eponymous problem. Another mathematician, who knew all three well, is accused of the murders. Luckily for him, his fiancée, though not a mathematician herself, is as much a truth-seeker as any, and her actions unravel the mystery while the reader gets a close look into the world of maths and the people who do it. Our amateur detective…
Cambridge, 1888, Miss Vanessa Duncan is recently arrived from the countryside to teach. But everything changes when Mr Akers, a Fellow f Mathematics, is found dead. When a second and then third mathematician are murdered, it becomes a race against time to solve the case.
I believe that knowledge is power. Understanding how something works leads to practical applications. In markets, I believe you should develop your own ideas on how to invest rather than being told. After all, how can you profit if you’re doing what everyone else is doing? Markets are efficient enough to give an opportunity to everyone but advantage to no one, unless you do something different than the crowd. My list is designed to give you information to develop investment strategies based on chaos theory, complexity, and fractals. It is not designed to tell you how to invest.
Readers of this list may be surprised that there are no books by Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals. I found his books fascinating but frustrating. Feder’s book, by contrast, was readable and usable.
This book taught me how to do fractal analysis. While Feder’s book has nothing to do with markets, it has everything to do with applications. While I reuse much of Feder’s methodology in my books, readers will find it useful to see other practical applications of fractal analysis.
This lovely little book will take off and fly on its own power, but the author has asked me to write a few words, and one should not say no to a friend. Specific topics in fractal geometry and its applications have already benefited from several excellent surveys of moderate length, and gossip and preliminary drafts tell us that we shall soon see several monographic treatments of broader topics. For the teacher, however, these surveys and monographs are not enough, and an urgent need for more helpful books has been widely recognized. To write such a book is no easy…
Explaining math demands great visuals. I should know: I explain math for a living, and I cannot draw. Like, at all. The LA Times art director once compared my cartoons to the work of children and institutionalized patients. (He printed them anyway.) In the nerdier corners of the internet, I’m known as the “Math with Bad Drawings” guy, and as a purveyor of artless art, I’ve developed an eye for the good stuff: striking visuals that bring mathematical concepts to life. Here are five books that blow my stick figures out of the water. (But please buy my book anyway, if for no deeper reason than pity.)
I admire James Gleick’s Chaos. Who doesn’t? It’s a landmark book, a masterpiece of science writing. But let’s be real: it’s not exactly a beach read, is it? If Chaos is a complex aged wine, then this book is a simple autumn cider: a photographic collage of nature’s fractals, sweetened with a splash of Gleick’s lyrical prose.
Nature's Chaos presents 80-100 colour photographs by Eliot Porter, each highlighting a different element of his lifelong fascination with what he calls the jumble and disorder in nature.
Riley Masterson has moved to Greenbrier, SC, anxious to escape the chaos that has overwhelmed her life.
Questioned in a murder in Alabama, she has spent eighteen months under suspicion by a sheriff’s office, unable to make an arrest. But things in gentrifying Greenbrier are not as they seem. As…
I draw and write the Sketchplanations newsletter, in which I'm slowly explaining the world, one sketch at a time. In it, I blend my training as a designer and entrepreneur, what I learned in my PhD at UC Berkeley, and my amateur love of sketching, and I try to share my personal lightbulb moments through simple sketches. I'm constantly looking for ideas that change how I look at the world and myself. The books here are some of those that have given me the most valuable ideas I want to share and entertained me along the way.
Geoffrey West does a remarkable thing in this book; he brings his training as a theoretical physicist to problems of biology, global sustainability, and the economics of our cities. He shows the power of mathematics to illuminate remarkable facts about fundamental questions like "Is there a limit to how long animals can live?", "How big can animals get?" and even "Why do cities last so long?"
I learned how the square-cube law explains why you couldn't have a real-life Godzilla, that all mammals share roughly the same amount of heartbeats, and about branching patterns in our lungs, rivers, and trees. Fascinating.
"This is science writing as wonder and as inspiration." —The Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal
From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in.
Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena…
I’ve always been fascinated by the quest to understand how nature works and to find patterns amid complexity. This drew me towards physics, which seemed unparalleled in its ability to uncover general rules. In contrast, biology seemed merely descriptive, and despite a fondness for wildlife, I stayed away from the subject in school. It turns out, however, that physics and biology are perfect companions; a whole field, biophysics, explores how physical principles are central to the workings of living things. I became a biophysicist, researching topics like the organization of gut microbes and teaching and writing about biophysics more broadly, at scales from DNA to ecosystems.
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 list either my book or his, I’ll list Gleick’s book, one of the best popular science books ever. It dives into the science of order and chaos, from the turbulence of Jupiter’s red spot to the unpredictability of weather, with a bit of biological pattern formation in the mix.…
Uncover one of the most exciting frontiers of modern physics in this fascinating, insightful and accessible overview of Chaos theory.
'An exceedingly readable introduction to a new intellectual world' Observer
From the turbulence of the weather to the complicated rythmns of the human heart, 'chaos' is at the centre of our day to day lives. Cutting across several scientific disciplines, James Gleick explores and elucidates the science of the unpredicatable with an immensely readable narrative style and flair.
'An awe-inspiring book. Reading Chaos gave me the sensation that someone had just found the light-switch' Douglas Adams
I believe that knowledge is power. Understanding how something works leads to practical applications. In markets, I believe you should develop your own ideas on how to invest rather than being told. After all, how can you profit if you’re doing what everyone else is doing? Markets are efficient enough to give an opportunity to everyone but advantage to no one, unless you do something different than the crowd. My list is designed to give you information to develop investment strategies based on chaos theory, complexity, and fractals. It is not designed to tell you how to invest.
The Austrian School of Economics has been completely non-mathematical. Yet their concepts have direct analogies to complexity theory. Reading this book gives you fundamental economic ideas that tie back to the mathematical foundations of complexity, chaos, and fractals.
When dealing with markets, which are made up of people, after all, I have always found that basing your ideas on behavior rather than pure mathematics is always the way to go. Otherwise, you will not know when the markets have changed, and your ideas may no longer work.
This book also brings us back to the idea of cycles and explains them in an intuitive way. O’Driscoll and Rizzo also write well, so this isn’t a dry academic overview. It is a book that gives you both theory and intuition.
The Economics of Time and Ignorance is one of the seminal works in modern Austrian economics. Its treatment of historical time and of uncertainty helped set the agenda for the remarkable revival of work in the Austrian tradition which has led to an ever wider interest in the once heretical ideas of Austrian economics. It is here reprinted with a substantial new introductory essay, outlining the major developments in the area since its original publication a decade ago.
Liza O’Connell was a horror buff in every sense of the word. But there was one deadly nightmare she would never be able to talk about … her own. A friend murdered. A business in trouble. A marriage struggling to survive. And that’s just the beginning.
I am Han. During my NDE I was informed by Light Beings that I should write my soul adventures. My body was burnt to a crisp. It did not even have hands! But back we came and after publishing more than 2 million words of Past Life adventures, readers keep on reporting that the Chronicles of Han books change their lives. It is with gratitude that I realize that the information in the books I am sharing with you have helped me through the years, during the accident where I should have died, and the healing process that now assists thousands of individuals.
Where The Alchemist is considered the beginner's book on esoteric wisdom, The Puppet Master's Secret is the PHD book about Fractals and what it means to be one, how it feels to be one, as well as the possibilities an awakened Fractal may consider after an incarnation.
This book hits home hard as I'm a Fractal of my Overself as well. The author is a personal friend who used some of our conversations in this book, making it a private biographical adventure for me. This book is meant to assist other Fractals on their journeys to decide if they want to become their own individuals.
