There is something admirable about the school of the Russians: they are thinkers doing math, with remarkable clarity, minimal formalism, and total absence of unnecessary pedantry one finds in more modern texts (in the post Bourbaki era). This is of course surprising as one would have expected the exact opposite from the products of the communist era. Mathematicians should be using this book as a model for their own composition. You can read it and reread it. Professors should assign this in addition to modern texts, as readers can get intutions, something alas absent from modern texts.

One of the author, Baz, gave me a copy of this book when it came out and it went to sleep in my library as I was not in a finance mood. I forgot about it until this week as I was stuck on a problem related to risk-neutral pricing and the Girsanov theorem concerning changes in probability measure. I looked at every passage on the the subject until I hit on it. Then I realized that I should have read it before: it is a condensed, but extremely deep , and complete exposition of the subject of theoretical finance.

No financial book has the clarity of this text. Other quant books do not have such notions as "pricing kernel" and economic theoretical matters.

I would recommend it as a necessary piece of the "quant" toolkit. Every quant should have it as a background tool as the usual quant literature is standalone and devoid of these concepts.

The writing is funny, smooth, and accessible -- not what you might expect from a book about math. What Ellenberg has written is ultimately a love letter to math. If the stories he tells add up to a larger lesson, it’s that 'to do mathematics is to be, at once, touched by fire and bound by reason' -- and that there are ways in which we’re all doing math, all the time.

This book takes us through the formulation of the theorems in "On Landau damping" by Clément Mouhot and Cédric Villani. Villani is playful in real life, his research is playful, and the book is playful.

This is a gem for a singular reason. One sees exactly how Villani (or a pure mathematician) goes from abstract to abstract without ever exiting the world of pure and symbolic mathematics, even though the subject concerns a very concrete real-world topic. I kept waiting for him to use simulations or even plots to see how the equations worked. But he did not ... he and Mouhot had recourse to outside help (a student or an assistant) for the graphs and he camly noted that they "looked" great. Later in the book he relied on others to do the numerical work... as an afterthought.

Most physicists, quants, and applied mathematicians would have played with a computer to get the intuition; Villani just worked with mathematical objects, abstract mathematical objects, and very abstract at that. And this is a big deal for the subject because it belongs to a certain class of problems that do not have analytic solutions, usually requiring numerical approaches. Landau damping is about something many people are indirectly familiar with. Some history: Fokker–Planck equation, itself the Kolmogorov forward equation, is used commonly as the law of motion of particles (hence diffusions in finance). We quants use it in the main partial stochastic differential equation. In plasma physics it is related to the Boltzman equation, which, by using mean-interraction in place of every interration (mean-field), leads to the Vlasov equation.

Landau damping is (sort of) about how things don't blow up because of some exponential decay. Proving it outside the linear version remained elusive. Villani and Mouhot set to prove it. They eventually do. One note. I read it in the English translation (because I was in a hurry to get the book), but noticed an oddity that may confuse the reader. "Calcul" in French does not mean "calculation" (in the sense of numerical calculation) but "derivation", so the reader might be confused about calculations thinking they were numerical when Villani stayed at the abstract/symbolic level. I would have read the book in one sitting.

It grips you like a detective novel. PS- Some UK BS operator, the type of journalist with an attempt at some PhD in something related to physics who thinks he knows it all and is the representative of the general public trashed the book in the Spectator. Ignore him: the fellow is clueless. Look at reviews by PRACTICING quants and mathematicians. I do not think there is another book like this one.

From this I learned how powerful the individual human mind could be, and also how much school wasn’t teaching me. It began to occur to me that the mainstream doesn’t necessarily have the best or only methods. That said, non-mainstream approaches still have the responsibility of coming up with the right answer. Query: does it these days ever make sense to actually use this stuff?

I'd recommend reading anything that helps develop your ability to understand and solve a problem. Triaging issues by importance and properly identifying their causes is critical in almost every aspect of business. Without that, you can easily spend a lot of time on the wrong problem, or an ineffective solution, and your time is, more or less, your most valuable commodity. So I'd suggest books like A Certain Ambiguity by Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal, or Freakonomics by Stephen Levitt‎ and Stephen Dubner - books which will explore different ways of delving into problems and understanding their impact.

Die Leute fragen häufig: „Welche Bücher haben Ihr Leben verändert?“ Wenn ich es ihnen erzähle, sind sie meist radikal enttäuscht. Das finde ich merkwürdig. Ich habe gerade ein Büro verlassen, und das sind 4 Regale mit Buchrücken, die mir wichtig genug waren, um sie mit nach Hause zu nehmen. Hier sind sie also.

Die Leute fragen häufig: „Welche Bücher haben Ihr Leben verändert?“ Wenn ich es ihnen erzähle, sind sie meist radikal enttäuscht. Das finde ich merkwürdig. Ich habe gerade ein Büro verlassen, und das sind 4 Regale mit Buchrücken, die mir wichtig genug waren, um sie mit nach Hause zu nehmen. Hier sind sie also.

Als Wahrscheinlichkeitspraktiker musste ich viele Bücher zu diesem Thema lesen. Die meisten sind lineare Kombinationen anderer Bücher und Ideen, die ohne wirkliches Verständnis aufbereitet wurden, dass die Idee der Wahrscheinlichkeit auf das griechische pisteuo (Glaubwürdigkeit) zurückgeht [und pithanon, das auf Latein zu wahrscheinlichkeit führte] und das klassische Denken durchdrang. Fast alle diese Autoren machten den Fehler zu glauben, dass die Menschen des Altertums sich nicht mit Wahrscheinlichkeiten befassten. Und die meisten Bücher wie "Gegen die Götter" liegen nicht einmal im Begriff der Wahrscheinlichkeit falsch: Quoten bei Münzwürfen sind nur eine Fußnote. Dasselbe gilt für aktuelle Experimente mit Wahrscheinlichkeitspsychologie. Wenn die Menschen des Altertums nicht auf berechenbare Wahrscheinlichkeiten standen, dann nicht wegen der Theologie, sondern weil sie keine hoch standardisierten Spiele mochten. Sie befassten sich mit komplexen Entscheidungen, nicht nur mit vereinfachten und gereinigten Wahrscheinlichkeiten. Und sie waren sehr raffiniert darin.

Der Autor ist sowohl Mathematiker als auch Philosoph, kein Philosoph, der eine Analysis-Klasse besucht hat, daher eine oberflächliche Vorstellung von Kombinatorik hat und sich von dem Fach dominiert fühlt, etwas, das das Fach der Wahrscheinlichkeitsphilosophie plagt. Dieses Buch steht weit über allen anderen: Ich habe noch nie eine tiefere Darstellung des Themas gesehen, da dieser Text neben den mathematischen Grundlagen auch den wahren philosophischen Ursprung des Begriffs der Wahrscheinlichkeit behandelt.

Schließlich behandelt Franklin Themen im Zusammenhang mit Ethik und Vertragsrecht, wie die Werke des mittelalterlichen Denkers Pierre de Jean Olivi, die heute nur noch von wenigen Menschen diskutiert werden.

Sehr umfassend, ausreichend technisch, um den größten Teil des maschinellen Lernens zu verstehen. Sehr nützlich als Nachschlagewerk (eigentlich gibt es kein anderes vollständiges Nachschlagewerk).

Die Autoren sind die Realität (Tibshirani ist derjenige hinter der LASSO-Regularisierungstechnik). Verwendet einige mathematische Statistiken ohne den Aufwand der Maßtheorie und vermeidet die offensichtlichen, aber komplizierten Beweise.

Ich besitze zwei Exemplare dieser Ausgabe, eines fürs Büro, eines für mein Haus, und die Autoren stellen Reisenden wie mir großzügig das PDF zur Verfügung.

I found this copy last week at Waterstone in London . It made me feel the plane ride was very short! I should have bought a couple. This is a great book for a refresher in analytical philosophy: pleasant, clear. Great training for people who tend to forget elementary relationships.

I did not know that JAP was a logician. Go buy this book!

The only competition is "Think" by Blackburn (rather boring).

Frage: Welche Bücher würden Sie jungen Menschen empfehlen, die sich für Ihren Berufsweg interessieren?

Antworten:

• „Nur mein Typ“ von Simon Garfield
• „Denken mit Schrift“ von Ellen Lupton
• „Lass mich nicht nachdenken“ von Steve Krug
• „Geometrie des Designs“ von Kimberly Elam
• „Rastersysteme im Grafikdesign“ von Josef Müller-Brockmann
• „ReWork“ von Jason Fried

Diese Titel sollten ein guter Anfang sein, denke ich.

Die Mathematik der Extremereignisse oder der entfernten Teile der Wahrscheinlichkeitsverteilungen ist eine eigene Disziplin, wichtiger als jede andere in Bezug auf Risiken und Entscheidungen, da einige Bereiche von den Extremen dominiert werden: für die Klasse der subexponentiellen (und der Natürlich für die Unterklasse der Potenzgesetze) SIND die Schwänze die Geschichte.

Jetzt ist dieses Buch die Bibel für das Feld. Es wurde sorgfältig aktualisiert. Es ist in dem Sinne vollständig, dass es nichts Relevantes gibt, das im Text nicht erwähnt, behandelt oder erwähnt wird. Mein Geschäft ist das versteckte Risiko, das dort anfängt, wo dieses Buch aufhört, und dafür brauche ich den vollständigsten Text.

Trotz der enormen Bedeutung des Fachgebiets gibt es eine sehr kleine Zahl von Mathematikern, die sich mit Schweifereignissen befassen; von diesen gibt es eine kleinere Gruppe, die sowohl innerhalb als auch außerhalb der "Cramer-Bedingungen" (intuitiv, dünnschwänziger oder exponentieller Rückgang) geht.

Es ist auch ein Buch, das an einem wächst. Ich hätte ihm 5 Sterne gegeben, als ich anfing, es zu benutzen; Heute gebe ich ihm 6 Sterne und nächstes Jahr sicherlich 7.

Ich kaufe ein zweites Exemplar für das Büro. Wenn ich mit 2 Wahrscheinlichkeitsbüchern auf eine einsame Insel gehen müsste, würde ich Fellers zwei Bände (geschrieben vor >40 Jahren) und diesen hier nehmen.

Ein Reinigungsdetail: Kaufen Sie das Hardcover, nicht das Taschenbuch, da die Tintenqualität für letzteres schwächer ist.

The book was given to me, ‘cause people know that I like that stuff.

Hier ist, was ich in meiner Bestätigung geschrieben habe: Emanuel Derman hat ein Buch meiner Art geschrieben, eine elegante Kombination aus Memoiren, Bekenntnis und Essay über Ethik, Wissenschaftsphilosophie und Berufspraxis. Er stellt überzeugend den Unterschied zwischen Modell und Theorie her und zeigt, warum Versuche, Finanzmärkte zu modellieren, niemals wirklich wissenschaftlich sein können. Es bestätigt diejenigen von uns, die der Meinung sind, dass Financial Modeling weder praktisch noch wissenschaftlich ist. Überaus lesenswert.

Nach den Bemerkungen hier scheinen die Leute Derman dafür verantwortlich zu machen, dass er nicht die Art von Büchern geschrieben hat, die sie normalerweise lesen ... Sie beschuldigen ihn, originell zu sein! Das ist sehr spießig. Dieses Buch ist ein persönlicher Essay; Wenn es Ihnen nicht gefällt, lesen Sie es nicht, es besteht kein Grund, dem Autor die Schuld dafür zu geben, dass er Ihre regelmäßige Wissenschaftsberichterstattung nicht liefert. Warum geben Sie Montaigne nicht die Schuld dafür, dass er mitten in einer von Plutarch inspirierten Meditation über den Krieg über seine persönlichen Gewohnheiten gesprochen hat?

Die Leute fragen häufig: „Welche Bücher haben Ihr Leben verändert?“ Wenn ich es ihnen erzähle, sind sie meist radikal enttäuscht. Das finde ich merkwürdig. Ich habe gerade ein Büro verlassen, und das sind 4 Regale mit Buchrücken, die mir wichtig genug waren, um sie mit nach Hause zu nehmen. Hier sind sie also.

It's a combination of scientific biography and explanation of the physics, particularly relating to electricity. It's just the best book of its kind I have ever read, and I just hugely enjoyed it. Couldn't put it down. It was a fabulous human achievement. And neither of the writers is a physicist.

Die Leute fragen häufig: „Welche Bücher haben Ihr Leben verändert?“ Wenn ich es ihnen erzähle, sind sie meist radikal enttäuscht. Das finde ich merkwürdig. Ich habe gerade ein Büro verlassen, und das sind 4 Regale mit Buchrücken, die mir wichtig genug waren, um sie mit nach Hause zu nehmen. Hier sind sie also.

I am relieved to finally find a book that deals with Black Swan Events in a new way. Ayache brings a reverse-probabilistic perspective: instead of considering that a price is the result of probabilistically derived expectation, he reverses the issues and investigates these artificial constructs as "probabilities" and "expectations" as secondary, derived, fictitious concepts that we bring about to explain prices, decisions, and other things.

This, of course, is just the beginning, so one has to be understanding about the speculative aspect of the effort --so view this as a gutsy look at the "end of probability" and how we will need to envision the world once we get rid of this artificial, antiquated tool. I am also glad to see that those of us trained in the trading of options can have views original enough to influence the philosophy of probability and the philosophical understanding of contingency.

A good teacher will leave you educated. But a great teacher will leave you curious. Well, Barbara Oakley is a great teacher. Not only does she have a mind for numbers, she has a way with words, and she makes every one of them count

Elon Musk and Facebook AI chief Yann LeCun have praised this textbook on one of software’s most promising frontiers. After its publication, Microsoft signed up coauthor Bengio, a pioneer in machine learning, as an adviser

Wenn Leser und Studenten mich nach einem brauchbaren Buch für Nichtmathematiker fragen, um sich mit der Wahrscheinlichkeit (oder einem probabilistischen Ansatz der Statistik) vertraut zu machen, bevor sie sich tiefergehenden Problemen zuwenden, schlage ich dieses Buch des verstorbenen A. Papoulis vor. Ich empfehle es sogar Mathematikern, da ihre Ausbildung oft dazu führt, dass sie zu viel Zeit mit Grenzwertsätzen und sehr wenig mit dem eigentlichen "Rohren" verbringen.

Die Behandlung hat keine Maßtheorie, kommt auf den Punkt und kann als Schreibtischreferenz verwendet werden. Wenn Sie Maßtheorie wollen, verbringen Sie einige Zeit damit, Billingsley zu lesen. Für natur- und ingenieurwissenschaftliche Anwendungen ist kein tiefgreifendes Verständnis der Maßtheorie erforderlich; es ist nicht notwendig für diejenigen, die nicht an Theoremen und technischen Beweisen arbeiten wollen.

Ich habe ein paar Beschwerden in den Kommentaren von Leuten bemerkt, die von der Behandlung frustriert waren: Achten Sie nicht darauf. Ignoriere sie. Das Thema selbst ist schwierig, nicht dieses Buch. Das Buch ist in der Tat bewundernswert und umfassend angesichts des aktuellen Stands der Technik. Ich verwende dieses Buch als Benchmark, während ich mein eigenes, aber fortgeschritteneres Lehrbuch (über Fehler bei der Verwendung statistischer Modelle) schreibe.

Alles, was in Papoulis abgeleitet und präsentiert wird, kann ich überspringen. Und wenn Studenten mich fragen, was sie als Voraussetzung brauchen, um an meinem Kurs teilzunehmen oder mein Buch zu lesen, lautet meine Antwort: Papoulis, wenn Sie ein Wissenschaftler sind, Varadhan, wenn Sie eher abstrakt sind.

I’m actually a self-taught programmer, so these books have really helped me with practical skills that I could put to use & yield results. The return on investment for these kinds of books is off the charts for me!

I read Anathem about six months ago when it was first released. Neal Stephenson is another author where I drop everything and read whatever he’s published as soon as possible. I’ve read all of his books: The Big U (his first book), Zodiac (eco-thriller), Snow Crash (world chaos, envisions a future Internet called the Multiverse), The Diamond Age (nanotech), Cryptonomicon (cryptography, computer history), and The Baroque Cycle (historical). Anathem is completely new and deals with an imaginary world where monk-like mathematicians have segmented themselves from the rest of society, mostly ignoring their wars and other petty issues. The avouts occasionally venture out from their sanctuaries to mingle with everyone else. Besides creating an entirely new vocabulary and writing a beautiful story, Stephenson also shows how even large problems can be overcome with intelligence, if you have enough time on your hands. Just don’t give up on the book early, it gets better and better as it goes on. And when you’re done, go read everything else he’s written.

Options Volatility Trading by Adam Warner also had a major impact on me because I have always been into investing and until this book I never quite understood the specific strategies behind making money when the market goes up OR down. I was familiar with short selling but wanted to explore option contracts so right after college a good friend gave me this book. I read it immediately and began putting what I learned into practice.

Very useful book, particularly in what concerns alternative L-Stable distributions. True, not too versed in financial theory but I'd rather see the author erring on the side of more physics than mathematical economics. As an author I don't ask much from books, just to deliver what they indend. This one does.

Clear historical description of Einstein/Bachelier. Hopefully one day we will call derivatives pricing the Bachelier valuation.

The book in short provides an excellent perspective on the statistical approach to asset price dynamics. Very clear and to the point.

I read this book after completing my exposition of overcompensation, how a stressor or a random event causes an increase in strength, in excess of what is needed, like a redundancy. I was also looking for evidence of convex reaction to stressor, or the effect of a mathematical property called Jensen's inequality in domains and found it exposed here (in other words, why a combination low dose (most of the time) and high dose (rarely) beats medium dose all the time. The authors presents the evidence for the phenomenon in the following: 1) acute stressors cum recovery beat both absence of stressors and chronic ones (this includes thermal variations); 2) stressors make one stronger (post traumatic growth); 3) risk management is mediated by the deep structures in us, not rational decision-making; 4) winning causes an increase in strength (the latter are more complicated effects of convexity/Jensen's Inequality).

Great book. I ignored the connection to financial markets while reading it. But I learned that when under stress, one should seek the familiar.

Bravo!

It helps you take a deeper look and understand why certain things happen in your life. It's an introduction to psychology. It helps you divide a person, just like you would do with a mathematical equation.

Boaler is one of those rare and remarkable educators who not only know the secret of great teaching but also know how to give that gift to others.

Ich lese alles unvoreingenommen und fordere mich oft selbst heraus, indem ich Bücher mit einer seltsamen Perspektive oder religiösen/spirituellen Ansichten auswähle. Diese Bücher spiegeln nicht meine persönlichen Gefühle wider, sondern Bücher, die dazu beigetragen haben, meine Sicht auf das Leben, die Liebe und das Glück zu formen.

Die Leute fragen häufig: „Welche Bücher haben Ihr Leben verändert?“ Wenn ich es ihnen erzähle, sind sie meist radikal enttäuscht. Das finde ich merkwürdig. Ich habe gerade ein Büro verlassen, und das sind 4 Regale mit Buchrücken, die mir wichtig genug waren, um sie mit nach Hause zu nehmen. Hier sind sie also.

Sergey Brin hatte „How to Read a Book“ von Mortimer J. Adler als eines seiner meist empfohlenen Bücher.

If you want an introduction to information theory, and, in a way, probability theory from the real front door, this is it. A clearly written book, very intuititive, explains things, such as the Monty Hall problem in a few lines. I will make it a prerequite before more technical great books, such as Cover and Thompson.

Few technical books and a bit of everything. The following books are currently sitting on my bedside table: "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", "Predictable Revenue", "Manufacturing Consent", "Agile Application Security". "Oauth In Action", "Serious Cryptography".

It does a great job exploring the opportunity for personalization in education, medicine and countless other fields — which will hopefully drive countless other opportunities.

I know which books I value when I end up buying a second copy after losing the first one. This book gives a complete overview of the basis of probability theory with some grounding in measure theory, and presents the main proofs. It is remarkable because of its concision and completeness: visibly prof Varadhan lectured from these notes and kept improving on them until we got this gem. There is not a single sentence too many, yet nothing is missing.

For those who don't know who he is, Varadhan stands as one of the greatest probabilists of all time. Learning probability from him is like learning from Aristotle. Varadhan has two other similar volumes one covering stochastic processes the other into the theory of large deviations (though older than this current text).

The book on Stochastic Processes should be paired with this one.

One of the books that Chris has found himself gifting a lot is an out-of-print book on thermodynamics called The Second Law. "It was written by an Oxfod physical chemistry professor named P. W. Atkins. That book is just a phenomenal, casual, infographic-laden read on how the world works from an energy perspective. I found that so incredibly useful in trying to understand how to do something, how to make something work, whether something's even possible. It's frequently my bullshit detector".

Dieses Buch ist ein großartiger Versuch, eine gewisse Universalität zu finden, die auf Systemen in einem „kritischen“ Zustand basiert, wobei Abweichungen von einem solchen Zustand in einer Weise stattfinden, die Potenzgesetzen folgt.

Der Sandhaufen ist dafür ein tolles Babymodell. Einige Leute kritisieren Baks Ansatz, manche schlagen sogar vor, dass wir in diesen „Sandhaufen“-Effekten möglicherweise keine Potenzgesetze erhalten, sondern etwas weniger Skalierbares in den Schwänzen. Der Punkt ist: na und? Der Mann hat Visionen. Ich habe mir die Rezensionen zu diesem Buch angesehen. Ein paar engstirnige Wissenschaftler scheinen es offensichtlich nicht zu mögen (viele mochten Per Baks Ego nicht).

Aber das Buch ist bemerkenswert intuitiv und die Präsentation ist so klar, dass er Sie an die Hand nimmt. Es ist sogar unterhaltsam. Wenn Sie nach Fehlern in seiner Argumentation suchen, erlaubt seine Pädagogik dies (uns, die sich mit Simulationen dieser Prozesse beschäftigen, ist sofort klar, dass Sie einen unendlichen Sandhaufen benötigen, um ein reines Potenzgesetz zu erhalten). Ein weiteres Problem. Ich bestelle das Buch schon seit Ewigkeiten bei Amazon.

Copernicus Books antwortet nicht auf E-Mails. Ich habe mein Exemplar in der Bibliothek der NYU bekommen. Bak ist vor 2 Jahren verstorben und niemand scheint auf sein Interesse und das von uns seinen Lesern zu drängen (dass gebrauchte Bücher für 99 verkauft werden, impliziert eine gewisse Nachfrage). Das überzeugt mich, NIEMALS bei Springer zu publizieren.

I read the review of Simon Blackburn trashing the book: Eco made a few mistakes concerning the two dogmas of empiricism (he confused Davidson's work with Quine's first dogma). So I am sure many readers hesitated after a review by such a rigorous big gun thinker as Blackburn.

When I started reading the book I was taken aback by the combination of depth and the vividness of the style. Eco is sprightly and alive, something that cannot be said of many philosophers dealing with the subject of categories.

The notion of categories is not trivial: you need a simple conditional prior to identify an object; it is a simple mathematical fact. You need to know what a table is to see it in the background separated from its surroundings. You need to know what a face is so when it rotates you know it is still the same face. Computers have had a hard time with such pattern recognition. A PRIOR category is a necessity. This was Kant's intuition (the so-called "rationalism"). This is also the field of semiotics as initially conceived. Eco took it to greater levels with his notion of what I would call in scientific language a compression, a "simplifation". This leads to the major problem we face today: what if the act of compressing is arbitrary?

Not just very deep but it is a breath of fresh air to see such a philosophical discussion nondull, nondry, alive!

The one book on Siilasmaa's list is this fantasy offering from Neal Stephenson. The novel relates two parallel stories, one about an elite group of code-breakers in World War II, and another set in the present day, about two grandchildren of members of the group trying to track down a previously unknown – and rumored to be unbreakable – Nazi code. The book's subject matter resonates with current issues surrounding data liberty, computer surveillance and cyber security.

B. J. also recommended Daily Rituals by Mason Currey for anyone who would enjoy seeing the daily routines of legends like Steve Jobs, Charles Darwin, and Charles Dickens. "It is so reassuring to see that everyone has their own system, and how dysfunctional a lot of them are".

Chronologically, my first favourite book probably was Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse played a pivotal role in helping me decide to become a teacher and in further pursuits afterwards. There are various interpretations of the text and many conclusions I could personally draw from, but the general theme entails following the life of a man in an institution of academic-like monks who study various subjects for the sake of knowledge itself - nothing done for money, “progress”, or technological advancement. In an age where academics is constantly pressured to lead students towards a job, I found that to be refreshing for me, especially as I had been living in Spain post-college trying to find some purpose beyond teaching English.

Learning to learn is beautiful and meaningful by itself, and in terms of how that relates to Ridj-it, this attitude has helped me to engage with the company in finding it to be rewarding for what it is, not because it serves some other external purpose. Investors don’t want to hear that, nor does anyone else relying on your existence, but thinking as such helps defend against dwelling on future scenarios and thoughts that inherently have no reality because, quite honestly, they don’t exist. The consequence of this commitment to the “now” is focus on the task at hand and the inevitable quality that follows. I’m not sure if I could have personally gotten to that point if I hadn’t committed myself to education via Hesse’s book.

This is something very hard to find, almost by definition: a literary writer who thinks in abstract terms (the only other such author I've read is Stanislaw Lem). These are philosophical thought experiments in their purest form, yet somehow magically delivered in a playful literary athmosphere. Borges is a mathematical philosopher, first and last. Ignore the "Latin American" categorization and the nonsense about his background and personal life: one should resist embedding him in a socio-cultural framework; he is as universal as they come. It is good to read a short story once in a while to see how literature and philosophy can be saved by the parable.

This is not just an important but an imperative project: to approach the problem of randomness and success using the state of the art scientific arsenal we have. Barabasi is the person.

There are two methods to consider in a risky strategy.

1) The first is to know all parameters about the future and engage in optimized portfolio construction, a lunacy unless one has a god-like knowledge of the future. Let us call it Markowitz-style. In order to implement a full Markowitz- style optimization, one needs to know the entire joint probability distribution of all assets for the entire future, plus the exact utility function for wealth at all future times. And without errors! (I have shown that estimation errors make the system explode.)

2) Kelly's method (or, rather, Kelly-Thorpe), developed around the same period, which requires no joint distribution or utility function. It is very robust. In practice one needs to estimate the ratio of expected profit to worst- case return-- dynamically adjusted to avoid ruin. In the case of barbell transformations, the worst case is guaranteed (leave 80% or so of your money in reserves). And model error is much, much milder under Kelly criterion. So, assuming one has the edge (as a sole central piece of information), engage in a dynamic strategy of variable betting, getting more conservative after losses ("cut your losses") and more aggressive "with the house's money". The entire focus is the avoidance of gambler's ruin.

The first strategy was only embraced by academic financial economists --empty suits without skin in the game -- because you can make an academic career writing BS papers with method 1 much better than with method 2. On the other hand EVERY SURVIVING speculator uses explicitly or implicitly method 2 (evidence: Ray Dalio, Paul Tudor Jones, Renaissance, even Goldman Sachs!) For the first method, think of LTCM and the banking failure.

Let me repeat. Method 2 is much, much, much more scientific in the true sense of the word, that is rigorous and applicable. Method 1 is good for "job market papers" . Now this book presents all the major papers for the second line of thinking. It is almost exhaustive; many great thinkers in Information theory and probability (Ed Thorpe, Leo Breiman, T M Cover, Bill Ziemba) are represented... even the original paper by Bernouilli.

Buy 2 copies, just in case you lose one. This book has more meat than any other book in decision theory, economics, finance, etc...

An essential playbook for success, happiness, and getting the most out of ourselves.

I read this book twice. The first time, I thought that it was excellent, the best compendium of ideas of social science by arguably the best thinker in the field. I took copious notes, etc. I agreed with its patchwork-style approach to rational decision making. I knew that it had huge insights applicable to my refusal of general theories [they don't work], rather limit ourselves to nuts and bolts [they work].

Then I started reading it again, as the book tends to locate itself by my bedside and sneaks itself in my suitcase when I go on a trip. It is as if the book wanted me to read it. It is what literature does to you when it is at its best. So I realized why: it had another layer of depth --and the author distilled ideas from the works of Proust, La Rochefoucault, Tocqueville, Montaigne, people with the kind of insights that extend beyond the ideas, and that makes you feel that a reductionist academic treatment of the subject will necessary distort it [& somehow Elster managed to combine Montaigne and Kahneman-Tversky]. So as an anti-Platonist I finally found a rigorous treatment of human nature that is not Platonistic --not academic (in the bad sense of the word).

I don’t have [a favourite book]. But I do have favourite characters: [....] All inhabitants of the apartment block on 11Rue Simon-Crubellier who lived inside George Perec’s ‘Life. A user’s manual.’.