On numerous occasions I have received questions on specific recommendations of popular books. Some readers seeking an accessible introduction to research topics that are the cutting edge of science today. Others prefer to read the opinion of scientists, want to know how they work and uplift the human aspect of knowledge creation. It is also common interest in a development of a whole field and, thus, have a strong vision of issues that appear fleetingly in the newspapers. Science popularization is a big bag full of goodies that fill the majority. Therefore it is common and comfortable to avoid giving recommendations.
This time I want to take sides in a positive and suggest reading a recent book: "Group Theory in the bedroom" Brian Hayes and edited by Hill and Wang (2008). I dare to recommend this set of articles because each piece that composes it exudes a natural elegance in the form of abstract and present issues in an entertaining way to advance concrete knowledge and clear. It is a craft book, entertaining, scientifically robust yet affordable.
Pick out a couple of items throughout the book. One of them is devoted to the contributions of Lewis Fry Richardson, a pioneer in the quantitative study of war. Richardson compiled the first catalog of wars, neutral and objective in order to analyze the generic features and, if possible, prediction. Hundreds of armed conflicts are classified by their intensity on a logarithmic scale of deaths. This gloomy analysis is no less disturbing. Wars appear following Poisson distributions show no correlation with the affinity of the language of the dispute, nor with his weapon grade. Wars are slightly correlated strongly with religion and with disputes between neighbors. A sober article, worthy of being known outside the scope of this blog.
A second article that I would recommend is the one that is NP-complete problems and phase transitions. It is a remarkable fact that ideas in physics are reflected in seemingly distant fields such as computational complexity. To be more specific, consider the problem of partitions. We have a set of N numbers. Each number can be written in binary notation using M digits 0 or 1. We separate them into two sets so that the sum of forming the first set is identical to the sum of which form the second. In many cases it is very easy to find a deal that would verify this requirement. In other cases it is almost impossible. The problem is computationally hard when there is no single solution. The surprise is that the transition from simple to hard cases occurs abruptly as a function of M / N. The analogy with a phase transition (like water to boil) is immediate and has been extensively studied in recent years. Mathematics, Physics, Theory of computing come together. I chose this sample paper as part of the Quantum Information community struggles to bring ideas of quantum to classical theory of computation. A quantum computer may change our concepts of a field as interdisciplinary and constantly evolving.
This and other issues as curious as the construction of clocks or the characterization of the watershed in the Hayes continent are treated with the proper office of scientific publication quality.
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