Books over­due because I’ve been busy, but worth not­ing any­way because they’re worth noting.

• I got one: Sin­clair Lewis Arrow­smith
  One of the best ear­li­est real­ist exam­i­na­tions of the moti­va­tions and lifestyle of Amer­i­can aca­d­e­mic engi­neers (includ­ing in that fold “doc­tors”, as they should be, now and in the 1900s), Mid­west­ern­ism (aka “Bab­bit­tism”), and the dif­fer­ences between our stated cul­tural expec­ta­tions and the implicit ones we gen­er­ate by the blind deci­sions we take in our lives.
• To Ref­er­ence: Clay­ton M. Chris­tensen The Innovator’s Dilemma
  Corporations—and by exten­sion insti­tu­tions of other types, like “med­i­cine” and “the Academy”—obtain the well-​​deserved rep­u­ta­tion as logy, stilted piles of dead wood because of their suc­cess, not despite it. Christensen’s obser­va­tion, cun­ningly masked as com­mon sense, seems to be that large insti­tu­tions can­not pur­sue inno­va­tions because their adap­tive moves are slower and more expen­sive for them than for smaller, new insti­tu­tions. In other words: the big­ger (and more suc­cess­ful) they are, the more likely to be replaced with­out even noticing.
• Meh: Jack E. Graver Count­ing on Frame­works: Math­e­mat­ics to Aid the Design of Rigid Struc­tures (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
  One of many math­e­mat­i­cal “recre­ations” books I’ve been thumb­ing lately, as we gear up to build a genetic pro­gram­ming inno­va­tion engine that will be able to make “math­e­mat­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies”. Graver’s mono­graph focuses on flexibility/​rigidity of two– and three-​​dimensional frame­works (sta­t­ics, essen­tially) and the dis­crete math and neat lit­tle the­o­rems that con­nect (get it? a pun!) graph the­ory, lin­ear alge­bra and engi­neer­ing design prin­ci­ples. One would want it to be a bit more “pop­u­lar­ized”, but it’s of inter­est as a land­mark for the future, at least.
• To Buy: Ross Hons­berger More Math­e­mat­i­cal Morsels (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
  This is more along the lines of what I was look­ing for: a few dozen very inter­est­ing, solv­able prob­lems that cross the line from “brain teaser” to “advanced home­work”. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not sit­ting here with a graph pad and a pen­cil try­ing to do make­work and proofs; I’m using these books to research the way we spec­ify (and mis-​​specify) com­plex prob­lems. Mostly plane geom­e­try, num­ber the­ory and a bit of (sim­ple) prob­a­bil­ity the­ory, the Morsels series seems to be prob­lems culled from those Math Olympiads I was never smart enough for, and var­i­ous ama­teur math jour­nals. Will buy because there are very few proofs; math­e­mat­i­cally rig­or­ous proofs are, to shine some clar­i­fy­ing light on my long-​​standing opin­ion, over­whelm­ingly a waste of the time of both the prover and his reader, since they are merely the algo­rith­mic dis­guis­ing of ini­tial assump­tions by wrap­ping them in hack­neyed rit­u­al­ized maneu­vers that decrease one’s cru­cial abil­ity to ques­tion the orig­i­nal crap you started from.
• To Buy: Vic­tor Klee and Stan Wagon Old and New Unsolved Prob­lems in Plane Geom­e­try and Num­ber The­ory (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
  As with the pre­vi­ous, a nice pile of small, simply-​​stated prob­lems, with the added fil­lip (for me, who Cf. above is inter­ested in build­ing com­pu­ta­tional affor­dances in sup­port of project man­age­ment for abstract problem-​​solving projects) that they’re mostly unsolved. Well, OK, they were; we have Fer­mat in here, and some oth­ers that will be famil­iar to folks who fol­low this kind of stuff. But there is plenty of grist in the mill here for me and my ilk, along the lines of, “How would you spec­ify the goals and con­straints of a prob­lem like, ‘Are the dig­its of the dec­i­mal expan­sion of π devoid of any pat­tern?’” I like that. That’s what real work is about, since it begs so many other ques­tions about who’s ask­ing, what they really want to know, and why.
• To Buy: Ross Hons­berger Math­e­mat­i­cal Chest­nuts from around the World (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
  Like the other Hons­berger books (all AFAIK from the Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions series), full of inter­est­ing and use­ful levers to use when learn­ing evo­lu­tion­ary com­put­ing and meta­heuris­tics more gen­er­ally. “The prod­uct of a bil­lion pos­i­tive inte­gers is a bil­lion. What is the great­est sum these bil­lion num­bers might have?” might be some­thing you’d throw a search algo­rithm at, except then you’re answer­ing more along the lines of “…What’s the largest sum you can find?” And that’s not the ques­tion. It’s my hope that by think­ing about these prob­lems as they’re stated, tech­ni­cal souls who by brain­washed in their home­work and work­lives to think of spe­cific exam­ples as some­thing to solve in a one-​​off way might be pushed to think­ing of how one can search for meth­ods. In other words: Para­met­ric mod­els are the crutch of a weak mind.
• To Buy: Louis L. Buc­cia­relli Engi­neer­ing Phi­los­o­phy
  Too short, too lit­tle, almost too late, but very very nice. A lovely quick mono­graph that would serve as an intro­duc­tion to sev­eral prob­lems we’ve been wrestling with lately at “work” (What’s “work”? You’ll see, soon enough…): “Design­ing, like lan­guage, is a social process”, “What engi­neers don’t know and why they believe it”, and per­haps the most inter­est­ing and best jumping-​​off point for a real mono­graph of its own: “Learn­ing Engi­neer­ing.” Don’t get me started on the actual engi­neer­ing stu­dents (and pro­fes­sors, and prac­ti­tion­ers) I know, who on the whole tend to think about their own work and what it implies very poorly. Not least because they believe they are con­cerned only with “the real world”. See? You got me started.
• To Bor­row: Arthur T. Ben­jamin and Jen­nifer J. Quinn Proofs that Really Count: The Art of Com­bi­na­to­r­ial Proof (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
  As I said before, proofs are not my cup of tea right now. But the men­tal processes that allow peo­ple to spec­ify and design proofs are. So this, being a work about the design pat­terns of com­bi­na­to­r­ial proofs that deal with “what is the most…?”, “how quickly does…?” and “how many are…?” kind of ques­tions is in fact more inter­est­ing than I first expected. The book starts, as do the other Dol­ciani books I’ve been brows­ing, with prob­lems, but does go into a num­ber of inter­est­ing work-​​them-​​through details that for me might be a shop­ping list of things to watch out for as we try to explain what evolved problem-​​solvers are actu­ally doing. For the moment I don’t want a how-​​to, I want a what-​​was-​​that? book, and this might come in use­ful some­day soon in that capacity.
• Meh: Arthur T. Ben­jamin and Ezra Brown, eds Bis­cuits of Num­ber The­ory (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
  Mostly proofs, pre­sented via a wide-​​ranging set of reprinted short papers.
• To Buy: Ross Hons­berger Math­e­mat­i­cal Delights (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
  Another Hons­berger col­lec­tion of quick plane geom­e­try, num­ber the­ory and light­weight com­bi­na­torics. One cutely meta one explores the “shared prop­er­ties of crank solu­tions to Fermat’s last theorem”.
• To Buy: Ross Hons­berger Math­e­mat­i­cal Gems III (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions, No.9)
  As above, with a nice sec­tion on cryp­tog­ra­phy and num­ber the­ory that would open up a lovely pile of prob­lems for genetic pro­gram­ming to be used on.
• To Admire: Stew­art Cof­fin Geo­met­ric Puz­zle Design
  You know those lit­tle wooden poly­he­dra things, where there are a bunch of sticks that inter­lock, and your goal is to slide and twist and poof they all fall apart, then your real goal of putting them all back together starts? So this is about how to make those, and more inter­est­ingly the design pat­terns you see: slid­ing blocks, coor­di­nated motion, mis­lead­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties, ways of using and abus­ing sym­me­tries, all the empty space (or com­pli­cated mech­a­nism) hid­den away on the inside. Very cool.
• To Buy: Ross Hons­berger Math­e­mat­i­cal Dia­monds (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
  Yeah, well, you get the pic­ture by now: nice. Why are these books so hard to find? Why aren’t they in more libraries?
• To Ref­er­ence: Michael O’Neill and Conor Ryan Gram­mat­i­cal Evo­lu­tion: Evo­lu­tion­ary Auto­matic Pro­gram­ming in an Arbi­trary Lan­guage (Genetic Pro­gram­ming)
  I know Conor from years back (Jesus, I’m old: back when he was doing this work, for exam­ple), and Gram­mat­i­cal Evo­lu­tion (GE) actu­ally fea­tures in a small way in the project I’ve been work­ing on for more than a year. So while I per­son­ally don’t need to own this, it was a worth­while read and if you’re inter­ested in a dif­fer­ent way (not stu­pid old S-​​expression GP) for evo­lu­tion­ary meth­ods to be used to evolve com­plex struc­tures like algo­rithms, proofs, clas­si­fiers, trad­ing agents, or what­ever, you should con­sider this book a good intro… if a wee bit out­dated. Because, you know, life moves on, and a lot of the stuff this par­tic­u­lar book has in it is old hat. In any case, more peo­ple ought to know about Gram­mat­i­cal Evo­lu­tion; it’d do them good to under­stand there’s more that one way to solve the problem.

  And if you’re a com­puter kind of per­son inter­ested in GE: Go have a look at Pavel Suchmann’s GERET sys­tem. I like it. Nice, clean code.

• To Admire: Conor Ryan Auto­matic Re-​​engineering of Soft­ware Using Genetic Pro­gram­ming (GENETIC PROGRAMMING Vol­ume 2)
  I said I knew Conor since way back; he was work­ing on this the­sis when I was work­ing on mine at Penn. (Spoiler: he got his degree, unlike me.) Thank you, Conor, for both the size and util­ity of the chap­ter enti­tled “Prac­ti­cal Con­sid­er­a­tions”: a land­mark notion in GP, now and then.
• To Buy: Anthony Brabazon and Michael O’Neill Bio­log­i­cally Inspired Algo­rithms for Finan­cial Mod­el­ling (Nat­ural Com­put­ing Series)
  Every­body who ever learned about meta­heuris­tics (even before they earned that st00pid name) said, “Hey! This would be a great way to play the stock mar­ket!” A long time ago, Bar­bara and I were at a com­pu­ta­tional finance con­fer­ence, watch­ing the aca­d­e­mics talk, and after a cou­ple of days I observed, “You only ever hear these peo­ple talk once: either their work is dumb, and we stop invit­ing them, or their work is smart, and they stop accept­ing our invi­ta­tions.” Brabazon and O’Neill have done some­thing dra­mat­i­cally unex­pected: writ­ten clearly and suc­cinctly about how to build work­ing trad­ing and finan­cial man­age­ment sys­tems. Throw all your other Springer books on Ama­zon; this one, if you’re inter­ested in this stuff, is the real deal. Also: more Gram­mat­i­cal Evo­lu­tion. Now you get the trend?
• Meh: Dan Kalman Uncom­mon Math­e­mat­i­cal Excur­sions: Poly­no­mia and Related Realms (Dol­ciani Math­e­mat­i­cal Expo­si­tions)
  Some­how not quite the same stuff as Honsberger’s. I think my reac­tion is not because the sub­ject mat­ter is dif­fer­ent (though it is, being con­cerned mostly with roots and struc­ture of poly­no­mial equa­tions and stuff), but rather that it’s kind of ped­a­gog­i­cally heavy-​​handed. Like a grad­u­ate sem­i­nar text or some­thing. Not for begin­ners, not for ama­teurs even, in my opin­ion: more of a focused, pro­gres­sive advanced train­ing session.