An interesting book collection

(This is a re-post from 2011)

Towards the end of 2011 I stumbled upon Harward's systems research lab and was curious to know about Indian grad students there. There was only a single student. Son of Mr. Narayan Murty (Infosys). Rohan Murty. I felt curious about the collection of books he had read since 2005. And here it is. 

I had always had this problem about finding a good source of books to read from a reliable source. This list made me extremely happy.

Men of Mathematics - E.T. Bell (5/5)

1984 - George Orwell (5/5)

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - Robert Kanigel (5/5)

Masters of Doom : How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture - David Kushner (5/5)

Fermat's Last Theorem - Simon Singh (5/5)

e: The Story of a Number - Eli Maor (5/5)

A Mathematician's Apology - G. H. Hardy (4/5)

Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick (3/5)

'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' (Adventures of a Curious Character) - Richard P. Feynman, Ralph Leighton, Edward Hutchings and Albert R. Hibbs (5/5)

What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character - Richard P. Feynman, Ralph Leighton (4/5)

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb - William Poundstone (3/5)

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman - Timothy Ferris (5/5)

Genius : The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick (3/5)

Trigonometric Delights - Eli Maor (3/5)

The Hilbert Challenge - Jeremy Gray (3/5)

No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman - Richard P. Feynman (3/5)

Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics - George Johnson (4/5)

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman - Richard P. Feynman and Jeffrey Robbins (2/5)

Feynman Lectures on Computation (2/5)

Six Easy Pieces, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces - Richard P. Feynman (4/5)

Six Easy Pieces - Richard P. Feynman (5/5)

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter (4/5)

Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun - David L. Goodstein, Judith R. Goodstein and Richard Phillips Feynman (2/5)

Strange Brains and Genius : The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen - Clifford A. Pickover - 2002 (2/5)

The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics - Marcus du Sautoy (4/5)

To Infinity and Beyond: A Cultural History of the Infinite - Eli Maor (4/5)

Interactions : A Journey Through the Mind of a Particle Physicist - Sheldon Glashow and Ben Bova (3/5)

Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey - Ralph Leighton - 2003 (2/5)

Selfish Routing and the Price of Anarchy - Tim Roughgarden (5/5)

Universities and Their Leadership - Bowen and Shapiro (Editors) - 2004 (5/5)

The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod - 2005 (3/5)

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (4/5)

Einstein: The Life and Times - Ronald Clark (3/5)

Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos - Steven Strogatz (4/5)

The Creation of the Future: The Role of the American University - Frank Rhodes - 2005 (5/5)

Emergence: From Chaos to Order - John H. Holland - 2005 (2/5)

Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond (3/5)

God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History - Stephen Hawking (2/5)

Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason - Charles Freeman - 2006 (5/5)

Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World - Stephen O'Shea - 2006 (4/5)

A Short History of Byzantium - John Julius Norwich - 2006 (4/5)

Byzantium: The Early Centuries - John Julius Norwich (5/5)

Byzantium: The Apogee - John Julius Norwhich (4/5)

Byzantium: The Decline and Fall - John Julius Norwhich (4/5)

For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery - Rodney Stark (3/5)

The Physics of Superheroes - James Kakalios (4/5)

One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism - Rodney Stark (3/5)

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond (1/5)

Behavioural Game Theory: Experiments in strategic interactions - Colin Camerer (3/5)

A Beautiful Mind - Slyvia Nassar (4/5)

Complete Yes Prime Minister - Jonathan Lynn and Anthony Jay (5/5)

Choice and Consequence - Thomas C. Schelling (3/5)

Readings in Political Economy - Kaushik Basu (3/5)

The Book of the Courtier - Baldesar Castiglione (3/5)

Rationality and Freedom - Amartya Sen (2/5)

Fate Is the Hunter - Ernest K. Gann (4/5)

Great Feuds in Mathematics - Hellman (4/5)

Constantine and the Conversion of Europe - Jones (3/5)

Becoming Charlemagne - Jeff Sypeck (4/5)

Moral Minds - Marc Hauser (4/5)

A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut (5/5)

Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine - Lenski (3/5)

The Story of Philosophy - Will Durant (5/5)

An Introduction to Political Philosophy - Wolff (5/5)

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins (3/5)

Letter to a Christian Nation - Sam Harris (3/5)

Lord Chesterfield's Letters - Lord Chesterfield (3/5)

American Prometheus - The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert J. Oppenheimer - Bird and Sherwin (4/5)

The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck (5/5)

The Moral Consequences of Economic Freedom - Friedman (5/5)

A History of Civilizations - Braudel (3/5)

Among the Believers - Naipaul (4/5)

God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist - Victor Stenger (3/5)

Bookless in Baghdad - Shashi Tharoor (2/5)

The Argumentative Indian - Amartya Sen (2/5)

Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (5/5)

Chairman of the Board: A Practical Guide - Brian Lechem (1/5)

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseni (3/5)

Big Bang - Simon Singh (5/5)

The Undercover Economist - Tim Hartford (4/5)

Right Hand Left Hand - Chris McManus (4/5)

The Battle for God - Karen Armstrong (4/5)

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel - Rebecca Goldstein (4/5)

Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics - Gino Segre (4/5)

God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism- Jonathan Kirsch (4/5)

The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher - Julian Baginni (2/5)

The Therapy of Desire - Martha Nussbaum (3/5)

Boeing versus Airbus - John Newhouse (4/5)

Physics of the Impossible - Michio Kaku (2/5)

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company - David Price (2/5)

Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul - Kenneth Miller (4/5)

Lectures on The History of Moral Philosophy - John Rawls (3/5)

The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist - Richard P. Feynman (2/5)

Vikram Sarabhai - Amrita Shah (3/5)

Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works - Arthur Rimbaud (4/5)

Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World - Timothy Brook (4/5)

Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life - Leonard Mlodinow (3/5)

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions - Martha Nussbaum (3/5)

Elizabeth Costello - J. M. Coetzee (5/5)

Mohandas - Rajmohan Gandhi (3/5)

Thus Spoke Zarathushtra - Friedrich Nietzsche (3/5)

Alberuni’s India - Al-Biruni (4/5)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain (5/5)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (5/5)

The Quantum Ten - Sheila Jones (4/5)

Poincaré’s Prize: The Hundred -Year Quest to Solve One of Math’s Greatest Puzzles - George G. Szpiro (4/5)

The Honors Class: Hilbert’s Problems and Their Solvers - Ben Yandell (3/5)

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments - George Johnson (3/5)

Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut (4/5)

The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg - Robert P. Crease (2/5)

Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code - Matt Ridley (1/5)

Empires of the Indus - Alice Albinia (4/5)

Essays of E. B. White - E. B. White (4/5)

Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science - John D. Barrow (4/5)

The Great American University - Jonathan Cole (5/5)

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar (4/5)