Great Books in Computer Sciences

The work contains the two most famous stories of fantasy fiction by Lewis Carroll the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898). He studied at Christ Church, Oxford, England, and after obtaining a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Mathematics, he remained at Christ Church as Mathematical Lecturer for the 47 years until his death.

This edition combines the notes of Gardner's 1960, The annotated Alice with his 1990 update, More annotated Alice, as well as additional discoveries and updates. It includes the classic art of Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914)

Alan Perlis (1922-1990), first editor of Communications of the ACM, first President (1962-1964) of the ACM, first (1966) recipient of the ACM's Turing Award, said: “The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.”

Hofstadter is currently College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science; Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology. He got his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1980.

The book includes the short tale by Lewis Carroll, "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles," Mind 4, number 14, April 1895, pages 278-280, in which the Achilles tries to force the tortoise to accept the law of modus ponens.

It also includes the MU-puzzle, an introduction to formal systems, an explanation of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, ...

Wikipedia has an article about the book.

A new preface by the author, but otherwise is a facsimile of the original edition, with the exact same 777 pages

Successor to Martin Gardner's column "Mathematical Games" in Scientific American. These columns appeared between January 1981 and July 1983.

Chapter 14: Magic Cubology (Rubik's Cube).

Includes selected writings of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and others with philosophical reflections by the authors about self, intellect, and consciousness. Includes previously published works by Alan Turing (1912-1964), Richard Dawkins, Raymond Merill Smullyan (b. 1919), John Serle, Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), among others.

Concerns the art of translating and includes the text of A une damoyselle malade by Clément Marot (ca1495-1544) with numerous English translations.

Wikipedia has an article about the book.

Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the University of Western Ontario.

"Computer Recreations" column of Scientific American

"World Seven: Core Wars."

Chapter 5: Gödel's Theorem; Chapter 14: Time and Space Complexity; Chapter 19: Minimum Spanning Trees; Chapter 28: Turing Machines

Smullyan was at Princeton University working under Alonzo Church for his doctorate. He entered in 1957 and was awarded his Ph.D. in 1959. Appointed to a post at Princeton in 1958, he worked there until 1961. He taught at Yeshiva universities and the City University of New York before joining Indiana's faculty in 1981. Oscar R. Ewing Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Indiana University, Bloomington. More at MacTutor History of Mathematics

"A certain enchanted forest is inhabited by talking birds."

"Given any numerical operation that can be performed by one these modern electronic computers, there is a bird here that can perform the same operation!"

"It means that the birds here could totally take over the job of the computers."

Collection of 20 reprint of his "Mathematical Games" columns from the 1959 and 1961 issues of Scientific American. 1. The binary system; 4. The games and puzzle of Lewis Carroll; 13. Polyominoes and fault-free rectangles

The 2001 edition is revised with a preface by Douglas Hotstadter.

Executive Director of CSLI and a Consulting Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Stanford University. He is a co-founder and Executive Director of the Stanford Media X Research Network

Books by Devlin

What is mathematics and why does it work? The authors quotes everyone from Lao-Tse, Robert Pirsig, Charles Darwin, Kurt Gödel, and Umberto Eco. Since 1999 John D. Barrow is Research Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge and Director of the Millennium Mathematics Project, an initiative to improve the understanding and appreciation of mathematics and its applications amongst young people and the general public. He is the author of several books about the nature and significance of modern developments in physics and astronomy, including The Left Hand of Creation, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, The World within the World, and, most recently, Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation.

Freely available on the Internet at download.

Udi Aharoni works at IBM Research and holds an M.A. in Computer Science. His interests include software engineering, machine learning, statistics, science in general, and animation. Short, animated scientific videos conceived by him have been featured in universities and at science fairs. See Zutopeida. Zuto is his first book.

An exciting read.

"Mathematicians and computer scientists are pursuing fundamentally different aims, and the mathematician's tools are not as appropriate as was once supposed to the questions of the computer scientist. The primary questions of computer science are not of computational possibilities but of expressional possibilities. Computer science does not need a theory of computation; it needs a comprehensive theory of process expression."

Interesting thesis, but this book does not have my recommendation.

Originally published 1967. Chapter 26: Messages From Outer Space.

This landmark 1971 classic is reprinted with new commentary and a preface from the author. Origin of "Ego-less programming."

James is a journalist and free-lance writer. He wrote a spoof of the Tao Te Ching consisting of short anecdotes divided into nine “books.”

A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: “How long will it take to design the system if I assign five programmers to it?”

“It will take one year,” said the master promptly.

“But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?”

The master programmer frowned. “In that case, it will take two years.”

“And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?”

The master programmer shrugged. “Then the design will never be complete,” he said.

James wrote two sequels: The Zen of Programming (1988) and Computer Parables (1989).

Origin of extreme programming: listening, testing, coding, and designing. Listening means meeting users regularly, and taking down "user stories." Testing means creating executable test scripts even before coding starts. Coding means pairs of programmers working together to create the simple solutions for tasks based on user stories. Designing means going over the code and "refactoring" it to remove any duplications or inelegant constructs.

Author is the Rouse Bell Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. Penrose is not the first to attack strong AI. Perhaps the most famous attack on the field was by John R. Searle, in his classic article "Minds, brains, and programs". In that article, Searle introduced the "Chinese Room" experiment and, in fact, termed the phrase "Strong AI".

1. What makes CDMA [code-division multiple access] work for my smartphone?
2. How does Google sell ad spaces?
3. How does Google rank webpages?
4. Now does Netflix recommend movies?
5. When can I trust an average rating on Amazon?
6. Why does Wikipedia even work?
7. How do I viralize a YouTube video and tip a Groupon deal?
8. How do I influence people of Facebook a and Twitter?
9. Can I really reach anyone in six steps?
10. Does the Internet have an Achilles' heal?
11. Why do AT&T and Verizon Wireless charge me $10 a GB?
12. How can I pay less for each GB?
13. How does traffic get through the Internet?
14. Why doesn't the Internet collapse under congestion?
15. How can Skype and BitTorrent be free?
16. What's inside the cloud of iCloud?
17. IPTV and Netflix: How can the Internet support video?
18. Why is WiFi faster at home than at a hopspot?
19. Why am I getting only a few % of the advertised 4G speed?
20. Is it fair that my neighbor's iPad downloads faster?

NYT book review

"In this lively and intriguing book, Albert-László Barabási traces the history of connected systems from early graph theory in the 18th century to cancer drugs based on our modern understanding of cellular networks, and identifies the correspondences between the work of network mapmakers active in a wide range of disciplines today. As he examines the networks behind such complex systems as the cell or society, he identifies the nodes and links, revealing the architecture of complexity and its universal organizing principles, which affect everything from democracy to disease."

An interwoven collection of tales in random directions with steps of various sizes. See Levy flight

Intellectual property

Wilkes, one of the founders of computing, has provided enormous contributions to the development of computers, including the design and construction of the EDSAC computer and early development of programming for a stored program computer. He was responsible for the concept of microprogramming. Wilkes also wrote the first paper to appear on cache memories and was an early worker in the field of wide-bandwidth local-area networks. In 1992 he was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology. He is staff adviser on research policy to the Director of AT&T Laboratories Cambridge (formerly ORL). For many years he was head of the Computer Laboratory of Cambridge University. In 1980, he moved to the Digital Equipment Corporation in Maynard, Massachusetts. He returned to England in the spring of 1986 in time to become a founding member of ORL and Member for Research Strategy on the Olivetti Research Board. He described my years at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory, together with my war experiences in radar and operational research, in Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer, MIT Press, 1985.

Brian Kernighan, Karl Fogel, Jon Betley, Tim Bray, Eilliott Rusty Harold, Michael Feathers, Alberto Savoia, Charles Petzold, Douglas Crofford, Henry S. Warren, Jr., Ashish Gulhati, Lincoln Stein, Jim Kent, jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek, Adam Kolawa, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Diomidis Spinellis, Andrew Kuchling (Python), Travis E. Oliphant, Ronald Mak (Java), Rogerio Atem de Carvlho and Rafael Monnerat, Bryan Cantrill (C, Solaris), Jeff Dean and Sanja Ghernawat (psuedo C, Google), Simon Peyton Jones (Haskell), Kent Dybvig (Scheme), William Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt (C++, network logging), Andrew Patzer, Andreas Zeller, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Arun Mehta, T. V. Raman (Emacs Lisp), Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald, Brian Heyes.

Doug Englebart, Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), Larry Tesler, Ken Kesey, Joan Baez, Bill Gates.

The transition from computers as big distant devices to the modern world of personal computers. Beginning with the idea of a 'Memex', put forward in 1945. How Doug Engelbart was inspired to try to make the vision a reality. He invented the computer 'mouse', among other contributions. They flowed into the work done by Xerox PARC, which in turn inspired the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows.

The title is a reference to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland. And more specifically to a song called White Rabbit from the American rock band Jefferson Airplane. Use and abuse of LSD is one theme running through this book.

Radical politics, pop, drugs and new technology are shown as intermingled. There was also an early split between the idea of commercial and free-supply computing. The young Bill Gates played a role, protesting at the way his Altair BASIC was being distributed free. Gates said in his Open Letter to Hobbyists; "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?". The book takes the contrary view.

Also a musical!

Biographies of Howard Aiken, Gene Amdahl, Archimedes, John Atanasoff, Charles Babbage, John Backus, Gordon Bell, Tim Berners-Lee, Dines Bjxrner, George Boole, Fred Brooks, Vannevar Bush, Vint Cerf, Alonzo Church, Noam Chomsky, Edgar Codd, Reni Descartes, Tom DeMarco, Edsger Dijkstra, George Devol, Larry Ellison, Don Estridge, Michael Fagan, Tommy Flowers, Robert Floyd, Bill Gates, James Gosling, C.A.R Hoare, Heman Hollerith, Watts Humphrey, Kenneth Iverson, Ivar Jacobson, Steve Jobs, Gary Kildall, Donald Knuth, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ada Lovelace, John McCarthy, John Mauchly, Marvin Minsky, Gordon Moore, Grace Murray Hopper, Ken Olsen, David Parnas, Dennis Ritchie, Dana Scott, John Searle, Claude Shannon, William Shockley, Richard Stallman, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Thomas Watson Sr. and Jr., Joseph Weizenbaum, Frederick Williams, Niklaus Wirth, Ed Yourdon, Konrad Zuse.

Biographies of Charles Babbage (1791-1871), Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954), John von Neumann (1903-1957), Claude Elwood Shannon (b. 1916), Konrad Zuse, John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995), John William Mauchly and John Presper Eckert (1919-1995), Howard Aiken, Jay Wright Forrester, Thomas John Watson, Sr. (1874-1956), William Norris, H. Ross Perot, William Shockley, Robert Noyce, Jack Kilby, Marcian E. (Ted) Hoff, Gene Amdahl, Seymour R. Cray, Gordon Bell, Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), John Warner Backus (b. 1924), John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, Gary Kildall (1942-1994), William Gates, Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson, Daniel Bricklin, Nolan Bushnell, Steven Jobs, Adam Osborne, William Nillard, and Donald Ervin Knuth.

Biographies of John Backus, John McCarthy, Alan C. Kay, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, Michael O. Rabin, Donald Ervin Knuth, Robert E. Tarjan, Leslie Lamport, Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Burton J. Smith, W. Daniel Hillis, Edward A. Feigenbaum, Douglas B. Lenat.

1. Charles Simonyi - one of the people from Xerox PARC, the guy behind Hungarian notation and the Microsoft Office applications. Worth $1 Billion, the 5th space tourist and dating Martha Stewart.
2. Butler Lampson - one of the people from Xerox PARC, came up with the full size monitor and mouse combination, laser printers and Ethernet.
3. John Warnock - one of the people from Xerox PARC, co-founder of Adobe, creator of PostScript.
4. Gary Kildall (1942-1994) - creator of CP/M, which he considered stolen to create MS-DOS, and founder of Digital Research, Inc.
5. Bill Gates - Microsoft.
6. John Page
7. C. Wayne Ratliff - creator of dBASE II, the first widely popular database program for PCs.
8. Dan Bricklin - creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for PCs.
9. Bob Frankston - creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for PCs.
10. Jonathan Sachs - creator of Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program and cofounder of Lotus Development Corporation.
11. Ray Ozzie - creator of Lotus Notes, current Chief Software Architect at Microsoft.
12. Peter Roizen
13. Robert Carr (b. 1956) - developed software for the Alto at Xerox PARC
14. Jef Raskin - started the Macintosh program at Apple.
15. Andy Hertzfeld - part of the original Macintosh group at Apple (creator of Scrapbook and Control Panel), creator of the Nautilius file manager for Linux/GNOME, currently working for Google.
16. Toru Iwatani - creator of Pac-man arcade game.
17. Scott Kim
18. Jason Lanier - coined the term Virtual Reality.
19. Michael Hawley

Foreword by James Gosling.

Peter H. Salus is Chief Knowledge Officer at Matrix NetSystems in Austin, Texas. He has served as director of many non-profit organizations: Tcl/Tk Consortium, Free Software Foundation, Sun User Group, Open Software Foundation, and the USENIX Association. From 1963 to 1983 he was in academia, serving as 1. Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, University of North Florida, 1980 - 1983; 2. Member, Governing Council, University of Toronto, 1976 - 1979; 3. Chairman, Division of Humanities, Scarborough College University of Toronto, 1969 - 1974; 4. Chairman, Program in Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, 1967 - 1969; 5. Chairman, Department of Linguistics, Queens College, CUNY, 1965 - 1967. Salus holds a Ph.D. (1963) New York University (Linguistics); an M.A., 1961, New York University (Germanic Languages); and a B.S., 1960, University College, New York University (Chemistry). He was awarded the NYU Founders' Day Award for `Distinguished Doctorate,' in 1964, and a Fulbright-Hayes grant to Iceland, 1962-63.

An essay which was originally published on-line in 1999 and later made available in book form. The essay is a commentary on why the proprietary operating systems business is unlikely to remain profitable in the future because of competition from free software. It also analyzes the corporate/collective culture of the Microsoft, Macintosh, and free software communities.

Foreword By: Douglas R. Hofstadter

See also Atanasoff, 1988, by Clark Mollenhoff.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the American Book Award in 1982. The author has written several other acclaimed books and writes for the Atlantic Monthly. This book tracks a team of engineers at Data General Corporation working on a new 32-bit superminicomputer.

More technical and focused on software is the book: Programming Interviews Exposed: Secretes to landing Your Next Job by John Mongan and Noan Soujanen.

Computing can be viewed from the hardware perspective with pioneers such as Babbage, Atanasoff, Zuse, Aiken, etc. This books takes the mathematical perspective. Turing used ideas from Cantor and Gödel to solve “the” decision problem formulated by Hilbert. The problem required a precision to logical reasoning that Frege provided which attempted to fulfill Leibniz's dream of a calculus for human reasoning.

1. Indexing. Nearness improves relevancy.
2. Page rank

   Back in 2002, the market share of the top three search engines in the United States was approximately equal, with Google, Yahoo, and MSN each having just under 30% of U.S. searches. In the next few years, Google made a dramatic improvement in its market share, crushing Yahoo and MSN down to under 20% each. It is widely believe that the phenomenal rise of Google to the top of the search industry was due to its ranking algorithms

3. Public Key Cryptography
4. Error Correcting Codes
5. Pattern Recognition
6. Data compression
7. Databases
8. Digital Signatures
9. What is Computable? [Not an algorithm, rather that some problems do not have algorithms.]

Aristotle, Leibniz, Menabrae, Boole, Hilbert, Turing, ...

Perhaps the most important book ever published on the history of logic and of the foundations of mathematics, is an anthology of translations. It includes the first complete translation of Frege's 1879 Begriffschrifft, and 45 other historically important short pieces on mathematical logic and axiomatic set theory published between 1889 and 1931, the year of Gödel's classic paper on the incompleteness of Peano arithmetic.

Nearly all the content of the Source Book was difficult to access, and all but four pieces had to be translated from one of 6 continental European languages. When possible, the author of the original text was asked to review the translation of his work, and suggest corrections and amendments. Each piece included editorial footnotes and an introduction, all references were combined into one list, and many misprints, inconsistencies, and errors in the originals were corrected. Especially important are the remarkable introductions to each translation, most written by Van Heijenoort himself. A few were written by Willard Quine.

Tim Wu is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He is best known for coining the phrase network neutrality in his 2003 paper "Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination".

“Attention itself has become the currency of the information age.” James Gleick.

NYT book review

A fabulous math book on group theory; it does not belong on this list, but I couldn't bear to remove it.

Lauren, a clever girl lost in Userland, applies logic and problem solving skills to find her way home, encountering along the way such concepts as timing attacks, algorithm design, and the traveling salesman problem.

“Captures the spirit of problem-solving and ignites readers’ imaginations.” — Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO

The lessons center on mathematics, but they're nontechnical and entirely accessible. (The author, a computer science professor at Berkeley, must be a superb lecturer.) There are occasional gleams of futuristic cybergear -- the novel is set a little further on in the 21st century, and two of the lovers are world-class code writers. But what's most delightful about ''Turing" is the charmed glow that Papadimitriou's prose sheds all around: on sunny Mediterranean islands, on the pangs of love, even on death, of which the all-wise ''Turing" gives an astonishing account to a dying character. And if you know anything of Turing's life -- one of the most interesting in the 20th century -- “Turing”'s conclusion is exquisitely affecting.

A novel about the nature of time using Einstein's dreams. Alan Lightman is a professor of physics and writing at MIT.

A few years ago John Horton Conway of the University of Cambridge hit on a remarkable new way to construct numbers &hhellip; Conway explained his new system to Donald E. Knuth, a computer scientist at Stanford University, when they happened to meet at lunch one day in 1972. Knuth was immediately fascinated by its possibilities and its revolutionary content. In 1973 during a week of relaxation in Oslo, Knuth wrote an introduction to Conway's method in the form of a novelette. … I believe it is the only time a major mathematical discovery has been published first in a work of fiction. &hhellip The book's primary aim, Knuth explains in a postscript, is not so much to teach Conway's theory as “to teach how one might go about developing such a theory.”