On the Origin of Species

By: Charles Robert Darwin.

Full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Charles Darwin published a book in 1859 to answer the question, “How do living organisms change and adapt?”. The book is a work of scientific literature which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology.

Between 1831 and 1836 Darwin travelled around the world as a naturalist aboard the Beagle. As he observed different species, Darwin was puzzled by tiny adaptive variations in closely related species such as the tortoises, iguanas and finches of the Galapagos Islands. How had these differences arisen? Darwin stumbled upon the solution two years after returning home, after reading Thomas Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

Yesterday, Tomorrow and You

This is not a reading, but it definitely fits the bill of “recommended viewing on Science” and it’s meaning in today’s world.

Profound, inspiring and thought-provoking 10 mins of the last 50 years. This video by James Burke explains so much about the world around us today. One of the most impacting videos.

The World Treasury of Physics Astronomy and Mathematics

Edited by: Timothy Ferris

This book is a collection of essays by scientists such as Richard Feynman, Pierre Curie, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Max Plank, Carl Sagan, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, and the like.

From the Preface…

“Science and mathematics are to our technically inclined societies what the composition of epic poetry was to the Homeric Greeks, or shipbuilding was to the Norsemen, or landscape painting to the Sung Dynasty Chinese; they are what we do best…Science has been called the twentieth century’s greatest art form…”

The Architecture of Complexity

Author: Herbert A. Simon
Date: Read April 26, 1962
[PDF]

Herbert A. Simon’s essay on complexity is the most cited paper in Hierarchy Theory. Herbert is a psychologist who is most noted for his work on decision theory and on organization theory. He is one of the founding figures in artificial intelligence, a winner of the Turing Award, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics and a co-founder of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

The central theme of the essay is that complexity frequently takes the form of hierarchy and that hierarchic systems have some common properties that are independent of their specific context. He claims that the hierarchic nature of complex systems enables us to decompose the systems into understandable and describable parts and “see” them. “If there are important systems in the world that are complex without being hierarchic, they may to a considerable extent escape our observation and our understanding.”

First post!

The purpose of this blog is to create a list of recommended readings (books, papers, articles, etc) in the subjects of interest for this blog. The subjects of interest being Computer Science, Mathematics (you might say Math is not Science and while I technically agree, I still consider it part of the same realm) and Physics (including Astrophysics).

Please help make the recommendations better (useful) by rating the entries.

If you found the recommendations useful, like it and/or share it. Or better, leave a comment!

Also, please shoot me an email if you’d like to make recommendations for the existing entries or suggest a new one!