I did some unpacking today and assembled some favorite technical books (mostly physics) on one set of shelves. There are more that are still lost in boxes, but I think this is a decent collection. Surely no man can call himself educated without being familiar with the contents of a few of these books ;-)
In response to comments I'm posting some shelves of less technical books. The best way to characterize the collection below is that all of these are good, and some are among my favorites.
Click for larger images.
No one can really be a renaissance man anymore. But Steve, with his understanding of econ, math, physics, genetics, and psychology has a broad understanding of the important stuff we've learned in the 21st century.. that's why I love reading this blog.
ReplyDeleteAny good books for a low M but decently high V person (with an IQ of approximately 115)? Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was just plain geometry, not spacetime and geometry!
ReplyDeleteHey where's Smolins "The trouble with physics?"
ReplyDeleteSteve, are there any here you can recommend for those of us on the left hand tail of the information processing reader math IQ bell curve? Can we see the rest of the Hsu library, Jerry Pournelle has often posted such on his chaos manor blog? http://www.jerrypournelle.com/images/2008/DSC01459.JPG
ReplyDeleteSchneier's crypto book is not a physics book. I bought that book almost 20 years ago. My colleague at that time said it was not a very good book since it falls through the crack as real cryptographers don't read that book ( not enough detail, not enough math) and people who read that book skipped the math, so if you actually follow the math in the book, you will find lots erros/typos.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if one day we will give a picture of our e-book library... Nice "vintage" pictures by the way. But so last century! I've got Gigabyte of technical books but funnily enough, whenever I need to understand or learn something, I prefer googling it. So I have thousand of books that I rarely open.
ReplyDeleteHey, I have just noticed: where is the Bible?
Is that BILLY?
ReplyDeleteI've counted 5 that I own too. (But it's probably 6 because I presume that you also have volume 2 of Weinberg.)
ReplyDeleteOne book that'd expect to see in this collection but I don't is Georgi's "Lie Algebras".
I think it's in a box somewhere...
ReplyDeleteSo you're not a fan of Landau and Lifshitz apparently...
ReplyDeleteIs that Feynman and Hibbs near the middle of the middle shelf? Those were being listed for $500 or so on Amazon a few years back, before the Dover edition came out. I was tempted to sell mine.
Steve, you should check out my shelf in my BPS office. It's a bit like yours, but where is Davies & Birrell? And where is your copy of Wald's "General Relativity"?
ReplyDeleteBecause I got my first degree in Germany, I also have all the GDR-printed German versions of Landau Lifshitz. They were dirt cheap then. My library at home has a bunch more Feynman volumes.
B&D is also there (yellow paperback) on the third shelf, not far from Wald. I have many more books but still in boxes ... I have most of Landau and Lifshitz but never got in the habit of using them much. You'll note I don't have Jackson or Goldstein or very many math books on the shelves yet ... I notice someone has kept the copy of Nielsen and Chuang I lent them; probably lots of other missing stuff :-(
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