Stats for nerds
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5mentions
5people
2010–2019years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I really enjoyed reading about Daniel Tammet and his book (Born on a Blue Day) is fascinating, but I'd hesitate to describe him as 'ordinary'. He's likely somewhere on the autism spectrum and also has synesthesia which affects his perception of numbers (amongst other things); his relationship with the world is going to be very different than for most people.
- Here's a few I've really liked that have a broader subject matter than only what you asked for. I figure that if you like to read you'd like these books.
--- NON-FICTION ---
Darkness Visible
A Mathemematician's Apology
Omnivore's Dilemma
Fermat's Enigma
The Code Book
Born to Run
Judgement of Paris
Siddhartha
Killing Pablo
The Victorian Internet
Lone Survivor
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman
Papillon
Into Thin Air
Born on a Blue Day
Touching the Void
Got Fight
The Conquest of Happiness
--- FICTION ---
Switch Bitch
Lost Horizon
The Cuckoo's Egg
The Simlarillion
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Alchemist
The Count of Monte Cristo
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Neverwhere
My Uncle Oswald
Stories of Your Life and Others
Invisible Cities
Life of Pi
Atlas Shrugged
--- WALL STREET / FINANCE ---
When Genius Failed
Liar's Poker
Buffett (Lowenstein)
Bull!
Black-Scholes and Beyond (textbook)
Fixed Income Securities (textbook)
The Road to Serfdom
The Smartest Guys in the Room
Fortune's Formula
The Fourth Turning
Inside the House of Money
--- ENTREPRENEURSHIP / COMPUTERS (non-textbook) ---
Masters of Doom
It's Not About the Bike
Dot. Bomb
Founders at Work
The PayPal Wars
Coders at Work
The Mousedriver Chronicles
Leaving Microsoft to Change the World
The Soul of a New Machine
Startup
The Hypomanic Edge
Small Giants
Small is the New Big
Four Hour Work Week
The Boy who Harnessed the Wind
Four Steps to the Epiphany
Pour your Heart into it
Beyond Software Architecture
Setting the Table
--- DESIGN / UX ---
On Writing
The Design of Everyday Things
Understanding Comics
The Elements of Typographic Style
Don't Make me Think!
A Pattern Language
--- PROGRAMMING ---
Programming Pearls
Effective Java
The Algorithm Design Manual
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
The Pragmatic Programmer
Refactoring
Java Concurrency in Practice
Java Puzzlers
Expert C Programming
--- COOKING ---
The Secrets of Cooking Revealed
Cooking for Geeks
The Bread Baker's Apprentice
The Brewmaster's Table
--- MISC ---
Robot Building for Beginners
Mountaineering - The Freedom of the Hills
A First Course in Coding Theory
The Computational Beauty of Nature
Total Control
The Ashley Book of Knots
Make: Electronics
- While looking for a way to explain my own aphantasia, I came across the works of Temple Grandin, a poster child of high-functioning autism. Since there is no physiological test for ASD, I believe that the following cognition types may be presented within the general audiences as well, however, they are not treated as outliers as long as their 'owners' have sufficient social skills. Thus, I suggest that you ignore autism/ASD references below:
"I have observed that there are three different specialized autistic/Asperger cognitive types. They are:
1) Visual thinkers such as I, who are often poor at algebra. 2) Verbal specialists who are good at talking and writing but they lack visual skills. 3) Pattern thinkers such as Daniel Tammet, who excel in math and music but may have problems with reading or writing composition." [1]
"<...>Chess masters think not in pictures or words, but are good in recognizing patterns. Pattern thinking is a more abstract form of visual thinking; thoughts are in patterns instead of photo-realistic pictures. Pattern thinkers see patterns and relationships between numbers. Some of the best descriptions are in Daniel Tammet’s book Born on a Blue Day (Tammet 2006) and in Jerry Newport’s book Mozart and the Whale (Newport et al. 2007). The weak areas in pattern thinkers is usually reading and writing composition." [1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/07/05/research-shows...
- Daniel Tammet has some pretty impressive synaesthetic abilities. From Born on a Blue Day:
> I never write anything down when I'm calculating, because I've always been able to do the sums in my head and it's much easier for me to visualise the answer using my synaesthetic shapes than to try to follow the `carry the one' techniques taught in textbooks we are given at school. When multiplying, I see the two numbers as distinct shapes. This image changes and a third shape emerges --- the correct answer. The process takes a matter of seconds and happens spontaneously. It's like doing maths without having to think.
> [...] I'm multiplying 53 by 131. I see both numbers as a unique shape and locate each spatially opposite the other. The space created between the two shapes creates a third, which I perceive as a new number: 6943, the solution to the sum. [sic]
- I've been wondering for a while where the boundary for being diagnosed with synaesthesia is - nearly everyone I know has some sort of synaesthesia, even if it's only associating numbers with colors. Yet, it's no where near the viewing-numbers-as-landscapes of Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day or Nabokov's gift with words.
