Saturday, March 29, 2014

Reading this week: 1

So here we are with the first installment!

Recently finished reading A Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith. A new detective, Cormoran Strike, makes a debut, investigating the death of a celebrity model. While the book is a bit rambling in places, Strike manages to carve out a place for himself and I really enjoyed it. There is less 'deduction' than I would have liked, but maybe it is the lot of 'real' detectives to do more travel and questioning than armchair theorizing. This was contemporary fiction after a long gap, and it gave me a strangely liberating feeling. The Silkworm by the same author is going to appear in June and most likely I will go for it. Last thing, Robert Galbraith is actually just a pseudonym used by J.K.Rowling. (but given the liberal use of b, c and f words, this one is definitely not for kids).

Recently I have also started reading Mathematical Thought by Morris Kline, which is a multi volume history of mathematics. On the rare chance that I stick with it, it could very well be a multi-year (but quite fruitful, going by the one chapter I read) project. The chapter I read, first one of the first volume, deals with the most ancient mathematics known, the Babylonian. While I had encountered this history before, Kline's account was quite refreshing. The term Babylonian comprises a number of civilizations living successively and concurrently in Mesopotamia for about four thousand years before Christ. Babylonians did not practice mathematics as an independent discipline yet, always approaching it in the context of practical problems, but their knowledge was quite sophisticated. They knew Pythagoras' theorem, how to solve quadratic equations and could predict eclipses to within a few minutes. Their economics was sophisticated, problems such calculating taxes, interests, areas of fields and buildings and shares of agriculture, money exchange and so on inspired many mathematical developments. 
The next chapter deals with Egyptian mathematics, hopefully I will report on it soon.

Also, here is an (as usual) excellent review of Our mathematical universe, which I was considering buying. This review is much more positive than others I read, and gives a good idea of what the books says, but for now I have decided to postpone buying it.

So that's all for now.

Friday, March 21, 2014

Reading this week: 0

Back here after quite a while! So hello there! And hopefully it is not just the web crawlers who visit these pages these days.

So yes, it seems there is less and less to write. The so called 'real world' has been throwing all kinds of things at me, and it seems it is only getting better in speed, accuracy and frequency. Not one to submit so easily (bwahaha), I keep reminding myself to blog more often, but have inevitably stumbled into the wall of 'what to write'.

So here is an idea. The model that I have followed (as far as books are concerned) upto this point is of a writing a post after finishing the book. It has two flaws. First, it requires actually finishing a book; and second, there is often more to say about a book than what can be put into a single post. So to kill two birds with a single stone (or to close two bugs with a single fix), it seems a better idea to report on current work in progress periodically. As the title suggests, the plan is to do it weekly. Where and how far it goes, of course, remains to be seen.