Best Game Theory
In this powerful and dramatic biography Sylvia Nasar vividly recreates the life of a mathematical genius whose career was cut short by schizophrenia and who, after three decades of devastating mental illness, miraculously recovered and was honored with a Nobel Prize. Sylvia Nasar is the author of the bestselling A Beautiful Mind , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Mirroring the arc of Nash’s own life, Nassar splits the book into several parts: the first part covers Nash’s early life and mathematical blossoming; the second part elucidates his burgeoning relationships and the importance of connections to the outside world, as well as his growing star and significant mathematical contributions. The third section delves into some of the roots of his coming mental illness, both in terms of mathematical failures and turmoil within his personal life, as well as the first acute symptoms and subsequent hospitalization. The fourth part dives deeply into his downfall and plunge into mental illness, with the psychological reasoning and process behind it."
"The book that inspired the movie."
"Nasar does a good job of telling the story without bogging down in mathematical terms."
"I appreciated this book for the depth of historical perspective it offered about mathematics, John Nash's struggle with schizophrenia, and the politics involved in the Nobel prizes."
"John Nash, the heralded math genius who would be around 83 years old now, fathered a son with the same illness."
"I purchased this book in order to learn about John Nash, Jr.'s life. Instead I found a book that rambled on about all sorts of others, but frequently it took pages and pages to get to John Nash, Jr.'s name or anything that related to him."
Using a diverse array of rich case studiesâfrom pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and historyâthe authors show how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I found this book was really good when thinking through decisions a coach or manager would make in sports, such as when to go for two-points instead of one, how to decide which way to kick on a penalty kick. Even if you're better kicking to the right, if the goalkeeper knows ahead of time which way you will kick, your chances of scoring a goal will decrease. You can increase your chance of scoring by randomly deciding to kick to the left some percentage (here is where the math kicks in) even through you aren't as good kicking to the left."
"Detailed, thorough, engaging, and readable."
"Such a great well-written book."
"The Art of Strategy provides an interesting mindset in the art of anticipating moves."
"With just one click book dropped into my folder."
"Great book well done."
"Well best book to understand game theory and its practical applications."
In It’s All a Game, British journalist and renowned games expert Tristan Donovan opens the box on the incredible and often surprising history and psychology of board games. "[A] timely book...It’s All a Game provides a wonderfully entertaining trip around the board, through 4,000 years of game history." "a fascinating and insightful discussion not only of games past, but the socioeconomic and historical factors that contributed to their popularity" ― Chicago Review of Books "There is both reason and rhyme for every one of Donovan’s historical installments, and the biographical bits are intriguing, revealing the kind of person who invents a board game... What Donovan has done with It’s All A Game is write a social history through board games." Turning a hobby into a fascinating history subject, It's All a Game manages to cover the entire realm of tabletop games in an easy-to-read yet fascinating tale.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I'm a lover of history and of board games."
"Not as much fun as playing a game, but almost."
"Tristan knows how to take a journalistic eye to game concepts."
"We like to play board games at my house so I was eager to read It’s All a Game to learn more about the creation of some of our favorite games. I wish the author had included a few other popular games such as Blokus and Sequence to round out the book, but overall he covered a good list of games. I recommend this book for those who enjoy playing board games; I learned so many cool details that add another dimension to my enjoyment of playing those games."
"(There are one or two exceptions that are topical instead, such as a chapter that explores how certain games were used in spy craft during World War II.). Donovan explores each game's roots, such as who invented it or why, and tracks its development into its modern form. This book isn't necessarily about getting up to speed on the trend, although it name-checks many popular titles, but it is an extremely readable and downright fun look at the world of games."
Best Organic Evolution
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW , SMITHSONIAN, AND WALL STREET JOURNAL A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"—create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. Prum's attention never strays far from nature, and his writing [about birds] is minutely detailed, exquisitely observant, deeply informed, and often tenderly sensual." Anyone interested in science or art or sex—which is to say everyone—will want to read it.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction “A fascinating account of beauty and mate choice in birds and other animals. "A major intellectual achievement that should hasten the adoption of a more expansive style of evolutionary explanation that Darwin himself would have appreciated." —Nick Romeo, Washington Post “A smorgasbord of evolutionary biology, philosophy, and sociology, filtered through Prum’s experiences as a birdwatcher and his diverse research on everything from dinosaur colors to duck sex. Through compelling arguments and colorful examples, Prum launches a counterstrike against the adaptationist regime, in an attempt to ‘put the subjective experience of animals back in the center of biology’ and to ‘bring beauty back to the sciences.’” —Ed Yong, The Atlantic “Prum’s career has been diverse and full, so that reading this fascinating book, we learn about the patterning of dinosaur feathers, consider the evolutionary basis of the human female orgasm, the tyranny of academic patriarchy, and the corkscrewed enormity of a duck’s penis. Combining this with in-depth study of how science selects the ideas it approves of and fine writing about fieldwork results in a rich, absorbing text . The dance Prum performs to convince you to take him on as an intellectual partner is beautiful and deserves to be appreciated on its own terms.” —Adrian Barnett, New Scientist.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"It concerns Darwin’s “other” great idea: That sexual selection (SS) is an evolutionary force driven by arbitrary aesthetic choices, rather than by the environmental imperatives that drive natural selection (NS). (Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871). Darwin’s theory of sexual selection had two components: Male-male competition for access to females, and female selection of males based on preference for male behavioral and physical traits. Prum takes Darwin’s idea about female mate choice* and runs with it, arguing that: • Female mate choice is often based on arbitrary and aesthetically pleasing (i.e., sexually attractive) male traits rather than characteristics that show adaptive fitness; thus, sexual selection is essentially different than natural selection. • This dynamic causes coevolution of male characteristics and female preferences, because the male trait and the female preference for it are both inherited by their offspring. • This coevolution can readily lead to a “Runaway Process” in which females come to prefer and males come to display very exaggerated traits. Males become more attractive by evolving appearance and displays preferred by females, but also by not being sexually coercive towards females – because coercive males are unlikely to be selected as mates in these species. • SS is such a strong force that the results can run counter to the adaptive results of natural selection; i.e., sexual selection can result in reduced fitness. Prum argues strenuously that sexual selection is driven by perceptions of beauty and sexual pleasure rather than any utilitarian purpose such as finding the fittest mate; he sums up these ideas as “Beauty Happens,” or “BH.” Later in the book he adds “Pleasure Happens.”. Much of his material is well-argued and supported with very interesting empirical evidence, mostly about birds. He is very convincing concerning the arbitrary origin of many of the traits females prefer in males; this book will likely change the way you think about animal evolution, at least to some degree. The results are that human males are kinder and less sexually coercive, by a long shot, than most of our nearest relatives, and on top of that human males provide parental care, which no other great ape male does, not even the famously peaceable Bonobo. They all concern Prum’s animus towards the adaptationist viewpoint; i.e., the theory that evolved features (including mating displays) are essentially about fitness. Prum has convinced me that many mating criteria are arbitrary in origin--but he further argues, at great length, that most sexual displays provide no information at all about male fitness, and this seems highly questionable. Oddly enough, in his argument about the irrelevance of fitness Prum echoes various Victorian critics of sexual selection whom he had previously eviscerated. When Darwin published his theory of sexual selection, Wallace and others (all men) claimed that female animals were too insensate to recognize or appreciate fancy male traits. Prum says that if mate choice concerns fitness, every teensy element of sometimes very complex displays must have been naturally selected for the information it provides about fitness. If Prum were to show us mating displays that favor inept, unhealthy, or weak males as much as their fitter counterparts he would have a stronger argument. I can’t evaluate all the details of Prum’s dismissal (although see below), but I perceive a considerable irony – Prum’s SS displays look just like Zahavian handicaps to me. Per Prum, males have developed costly aesthetic displays in response to female preferences, just as, per Zahavi, they have developed costly handicaps to advertise their fitness to those same females. Prum says that the appropriate null hypothesis for the theory that mating displays are about fitness is his own Beauty Happens theory. I.e., to prove that displays are about fitness, experimenters must prove that displays are NOT about aesthetic sexual attractiveness. It is almost the same book as Prum’s regarding the components of sexual selection, including similar but much deeper material about humans, with one major difference--Miller is an adaptationist, and believes that those Runaway-process-arbitrarily-chosen-aesthetically-pleasing-behaviorally-remodelled display traits tend to impart information about fitness."
"pretty interesting, but long and boring in spots."
"These former iconoclasts are now revered names – E. O. Wilson,Richard Dawkins),Daniel Dennett, Hrdy, Pinker and many others. This second opus was not nearly as well received as The Origin of Species. Viz: the peacock's cumbersome tail is a signal that it must be a very healthy bird indeed to bear such a handicap and yet survive. He makes a strong case that (1) female choice operates among all bird species, though more strongly among some than others, (2) that male and female behavior co-evolved in ways that were (3) often unrelated to adaptive fitness – how well the birds could cope with their environment. One of my frustrations as a reviewer is that the opponents of books such as The Bell Curve and Climate Change Reconsidered talk them down, they seldom offer refutations. Discussions of the individual chapters are included as comments 1-3.. 1: Darwin’s Really Dangerous Idea. 2: Beauty Happens. 3: Manakin Dances. 4: Aesthetic Innovation and Decadence. 5: Make Way for Duck Sex. 6: Beauty from the Beast. 7: Bromance Before Romance. 8: Human Beauty Happens Too. 9: Pleasure Happens. 10: The Lysistrata Effect. 11: The Queering of Homo sapiens. 12: This Aesthetic View of Life."
"Some might think his ideas might go over the top in the second part of the book, but in my judgement, Prum doesn't even scratch the surface of the depth to which sexual selection has influenced human evolution."