100 books like The Lady Tasting Tea

Once I finished reading Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it wasn’t long before I learned that he had followed it up with a collection of deeper analyses in the realm of the philosophy of science.

His sequel book took me deeper into the minds and conflicts of noted greats of science whose scientific contributions’ acceptance is now taken for granted by most. Yet, in their own day, they, too, often had to contend with the tension of science’s and scientists’ history of preferring what consensus had ordained as settled knowledge instead of welcoming new insights and discoveries.

This is the book that changed my thinking about science—but I had to read it twice before I understood what was really going on. It’s not the revolutions that are radical, but ordinary science, which motivates scientists to undertake long, arduous, risky programs of experimentation or observation by providing a guarantee that they cannot possibly fail.

The guarantee comes in the form of the famous Kuhnian “paradigm,” which is a blueprint for doing scientific research that ordinary scientists are not permitted to question. But paradigms can fail, and so the guarantee that motivates scientists is a piece of fakery. Science, in effect, creates a social institution that dupes scientists into doing what’s good for scientific discovery but maybe not so good for the individual scientist. It’s an astonishing idea.

Though I have been a scientist for nearly all of my life, as a student and as a professional, not until I read this book did I understand what an amazing human activity science is. I had never imagined a world without the word or practice of “science” or even “scientist,” as I do now because of this captivating book.

Wootton’s book is more than a history of how humankind invented and developed one of its most powerful tools. It also reveals the many simply exquisite workings of that tool over the centuries. After pondering its many remarkable revelations, interconnections, and insights, even as a scientist, my appreciation of the significance of science and scientists in the world has re-blossomed.

I don’t remember how this book made it into my hands, but I am so glad it did! This book has made me a better scientist because it taught me scientific humility. Popper rips apart the very fabric of experimental science’s unique and most powerful tool, the scientific method.

When I taught students at MIT how to apply experimental analysis with the scientific method to establish that an observed effect was, in fact, caused by an identified factor, always in my head, I would hear the words of Popper. Past relationships between factors and effects are not necessarily maintained in the future. This understanding of the nature of the universe reveals the imperfections of science, which rarely proves the world’s truths but often does elucidate them.

This book has haunted me for years. For what is it, exactly, that gives it such enduring popularity? After all, it was first published in 1936, yet is still in print today. In his autobiography, Hogben remarks on the importance of eye-catching illustrations but speculates that its success may instead be because the book contains – most unusually for a 'popular' work – exercises and answers, making it more suitable for self-teaching. Whatever the real answer, his book must surely have something to teach anyone – like myself – who aspires to bring mainstream mathematics to life for the general public.

Polya was a great mathematician who knew what counted (after all, he made major contributions to combinatorics, the mathematics of counting). He thought hard about what he was doing when working on problems in mathematics, developing a mental process that lead to creative breakthroughs and solutions. Polya’s problem-solving method is broadly applicable to domains other than mathematics, and this book features many nice puzzles to improve your thinking.

Algorithm design is challenging because it often requires flashes of sudden insight which seem to come out of the blue. But there is a way of thinking about problems that make such flashes more likely to happen. I try to teach this thought process in my books, but Polya got there first.

I’ve read a whole bunch of books on the history of mathematics, but this is by far my favorite.

Singh uses the most famous problem in mathematics, called “Fermat’s Last Theorem” to give us a kaleidoscopic account of the subject, starting with the Greek greats like Pythagoras and Plato, and taking us all the way to Andrew Wiles, the contemporary mathematician who finally solved Fermat’s theorem after a few centuries’ worth of attempts.

The book truly gets to the heart of what drives mathematicians. It also is so full of delicious anecdotes and thoroughly engaging math puzzles that I simply couldn’t put it down. I especially love the fact that Singh shows how so much of mathematics came from non-European civilizations, a fact we often forget.

Have you ever been to a mathematics lecture where the speaker wore a tuxedo and baffled the audience with his mystifying knowledge of numbers? Well, I have and the speaker was Arthur Benjamin, who combined mathematics and magic. He even displayed this knowledge with Stephen Colbert on his earlier show The Colbert Report. It is our good fortune that he describes much of this mathematical wizardry in this fascinating book. 

This book is full of beautiful puzzles on a mathematical topic called pursuit evasion. Its author Paul Nahin has written tens of books in physics and mathematics.

Nahin's writing can be described as a captivating reading experience pulling readers into his world like a whirlpool. His appreciation of mathematics, physics, and the people who discover them is unmatchable. It seems like the physics of motion and the mathematics of calculus is inseparable, as can be witnessed in the book.

The calculus used in this book is heavy. Nevertheless, Nahin makes his readers fall in love with this big beast. Almost every puzzle in this book is aesthetically beautiful and gives readers a deep sense of satisfaction. My favorites include Lady in the Lake, and Lion and Man.