My Bookshelf

Some books and papers that I enjoy or want to read in the future. This page is only occasionally updated, and will forever be out-of-date. For now, it can hopefully give you some insight into my interests and give some better visibilities to authors that inspire me.

Papers I've Enjoyed

Aside: This section is the most chronically out-of-date, since I try to read at least one paper per day and narrowing down favorites retrospectively is a large task. I've written some code to fetch and parse data on what I've read via Zotero, however I have yet to decide how to organize and display this data to you, dear reader, such that it isn't an overwhelming hose of information.

Regardless, these papers have played a large role in shaping me and still deserve a place here.



Books

You can also find me on Goodreads, which tends to be more up to date.

Books I Like

  • The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn by Richard Hamming [3]
  • Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines by Marvin Minsky
  • Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson
  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter [1]
  • Remembrance of Earth's Past (Trilogy) by Liu Cixin
  • Calculus, Fourth Edition by Michael Spivak (ISBN-10 0914098918) [2]

Books I'm Working Through

  • Visual Group Theory by Nathan Carter
  • To Mock a Mockingbird and Other Logic Puzzles by Raymond M. Smullyan

Books I Want to Read

  • Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
  • The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose

[1] This book has truly changed the way I think about intelligence and formal systems in a profound way. Along with the "Rememeberance of Earth's Past" trilogy, this has now become a book that I recommend to many people. I think it is highly motivating in some of what I want to focus on in my future studies.

[2] Funnily enough, this is one of my favorite books that I learned from during my undergrad. Calculus by Spivak is a great book, even to look back on!

[3] More so than the book, I highly, highly, recommend Hamming's lecture series "Learning to Learn", which you can find on YouTube. In particular, the last lecture in that series "You and Your Research", which for me was lifechanging. I think that everyone, whether in research or industry, would take great value from watching that lecture. You can think of it less of a lecture in the academic sense, and more of a sermon on how to lead a great life -- great by your standards.