Patrick Collison's Bookshelf | Hacker News Reader

Patrick Collison's Bookshelf

patrickcollison.com

148 pointsrspivak19 comments

I was very pleasantly surprised to see Don Kagan's "Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War" in the list. His "Introduction to Ancient Greece" class is really good (and available online for free).

I'd also strongly suggest anyone interested in that topic to read Thucydides' original "History of the Peloponnesian War," which is probably the most influential history book ever written.

When I see this unsorted list that takes multiple scrolls to see it all, I feel annoyed. My need for order isn't met. Could he order by his own ranking? I can't even Find his top suggested books (unless I fiddle in View Source).

> I flagged a few books that I thought were particularly great in green and those that I thought were substantially above average in light blue.

On a related note, I find very interesting Patrick Collison’s curated bookshelf on successful industrial/applied research labs: https://patrickcollison.com/labs

I’m currently reading “Dream machines: JCR Licklider and...” and enjoying it very much.

If you guys would condense this list to the absolute essential must-reads, what would be left on your list?

I think it would depend on what you’re into, but these are my picks:

Quantum Electrodynamics (Feynman): A summary of how almost EVERYTHING works (albeit explained simplistically).

Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger (great insights / worldly wisdom from one of the world’s greatest investors).

The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (Great overview of mathematics).

Quantum Mechanics: Concepts and Applications (Great QM book).

Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization (Great leadership / management insights).

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (An extremely simplified historical overview of how we got here).

The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail Classics) (Random journaling from one of the world’s greatest prose writers: Fernando Pessoa).

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Excellent explanation on how computers work from bottom -> top).

The Machinery of Life (Includes excellent visuals in biology).

The Character of Physical Law (Great insights in physics by Feynman).

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement (Great book on business process improvement).

How to Win Friends & Influence People (Nothing groundbreaking, but still a worthy read).

Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming (Great info and insights from some of the greatest software developers of all time).

The Periodic Table (Great read and some of the greatest prose writing you’ll ever encounter).

Highly recommended is the interview on Econtalk with him. What an erudite man.

He seems to be like me: no matter how many times I read about quantum fields and quantum mechanics, I never seem to get it, and I read a different book on the same topic.

You should read a book that presents classical mechanics in a simple way, then read both a book that presents classical fields and a book that presents classical mechanics in a complicated (modern) way, and then finally go back and read a book that is about quantum mechanics.

Although QM textbooks usually begin with a deceptively elementary introduction, it's actually there as a compressed review of many semesters of learning that was expected to have taken place beforehand. I don't think anybody has ever picked up a book on QFT and understood it without first having learned the foundations.

For me the best way is to forget the physical motivations and the historical development during first encounter, I know it is controversial but it helps you to starts calculating fast and not get boggled in philosophical stuff. Take everything "on faith" then after you know how to work with the mathematical machinery, go back and study a different book, based on the historical development and with more physical intuition.

The list of prerequisites isn't really the historical motivation, in fact is almost impossible to find the historical perspective in textbooks. It's secretly a way of teaching math and concepts to students who do not already know them. If you already know all of the necessary math you can come in "sideways" like you are describing, and it is not that controversial. Granted you will have no idea about what's going on if you don't understand Newton's laws and friends.

Plenty of books dedicate the first parts of the course to the experimental evidence of the need of a new theory, namely:the ultraviolet catastrophe of the blackbody radiation, the photoelectric effect, the unexplained stability of the electron position in an atom among others. From there you introduce, the Planck constant, the quantum of light concept, the de Broglie particle-wave duality and the Schrodinger equation and off you go. It is a pretty standard approach. As per the study of QM as a mathematical probabilistic theory you dont need Newtons Laws at all. The 5,6 postulates are pretty standard, and you take the position operator and the Hamiltonian definitions as part of them , no need to relate them to classical counterparts, at least until you prove the Ehrenfest theorem.

I understand why People of Twitter might want to read his whole library, but what do you find interesting about this personally? To me it just looks like a random list of book titles.

At least contrasted to a resource like this: https://sivers.org/book

You can learn a lot about who a person is trying to become by the books in their library. My interest, limited though it might be, is primarily who does Patrick Collison want to become ?

I use Goodreads for the same principle.

> My interest, limited though it might be, is primarily who does Patrick Collison want to become ?

No offence but what does that question even mean. Can't a person wish merely to become better read, more knowledgeable, both stoke and satisfy a lifelong inquisitiveness?

The person you've described seems like they are choosing a person to become. A person who wishes to become better read and more knowledgeable wants to become a different person than a person who wants to read solely pulp mysteries.

Patrick Collison is widely regarded as a smart, thoughtful, and accomplished, and I don't think it's weird to want to know what he thinks is important to know in the future.

Patrick Collison is enormously well read and just generally an interesting thinker. That leads me to be interested in his curation of what books he thinks matter.

> I've only read about half of the books here.

Even the author of the post hasn't read his whole library yet.

Perhaps he is of the Umberto Eco school; https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilib...

From the original post: "(I guess I fall somewhere in the middle in the Umberto Eco theory of the library.)"

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