Mathematics, Technology & Society Past Readings
2023
- Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
- Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning
- Jackie Higgins, Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses
- Robert Hazen, Symphony in C: Carbon and the Evolution of (Almost) Everything
- Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky
- Henry Petroski, Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop
- Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell
- Seirian Sumner, Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps
- James Vincent, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants
- David Hone, How Fast Did T.Rex Run?: Unsolved Questions from the Frontiers of Dinosaur Science
- Matthew Shindell, For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the of the Red Planet
2022
- David Stipp, A Most Elegant Equation: Euler’s Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics
- Carl Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics; Paul Nurse, What Is Life? Five Great Ideas in Biology
- Caleb Scharf, The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life’s Unending Algorithm
- Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World
- Michael J. Benton and Bob Nicholls, Dinosaurs: New Visions of a Lost World
- Lisa Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann
- Peter Atkins, Atkins’ Molecules
- Jeremy Desilva, First Steps, How Upright Walking Made Us Human
- Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition
- Lisa Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London
- Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann
- Peter Atkins, Atkins’ Molecules
- Jeremy Desilva, First Steps, How Upright Walking Made Us Human
- Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition
2021
- Eli Maor, Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg
- A.S. Barwich, Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind
- Michael Strevens, Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
- Joseph Mazur, The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time
- Nick Lane, Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World
- Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos
- Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
- Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think
- Tim Gregory, Meteorite: How Stones From Outer Space Made Our World
- Roland Ennos, The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization
- Paul Sen, Einstein’s Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe
2020
- David Hockney and Martin Gayford, A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen
- Ian Stewart, Do Dice Play God? The Mathematics of Uncertainty
- Cathy Cobb and Harold Goldwhite, Creations Of Fire: Chemistry’s Lively History From Alchemy To The Atomic Age
- Nathaniel Bradlee, History Introduction of Pure Water into the City of Boston
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
- Jack Hartnell, Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages
- Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our
- Futures
- John McPhee, Basin and Range
- Naomi Oreskes, Stephen Macedo, et al. , Why Trust Science?
- Sean Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime
2019
- Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
- Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology
- Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson, Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History
- David Quammen and Jacques Roy, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
- David Reich, Who Are We and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past
- Jim Holt, When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
- Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
- Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself. Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed
- Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator
2018
- Fred Piper and Sean Murphy, Cryptography: A Very Short Introduction
- Paul Halpern, The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality
- Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World
- Nick Bostrom, Super Intelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
- Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities
- Simon Winchester, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
- Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
- Steven Weinberg, Third Thoughts
- Alan Jasanoff, The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are
- Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
2017
- Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
- Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are
- Eugene S. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye
- Arlindo Oliveira, The Digital Mind: How Science is Redefining Humanity
- Ian Stewart, Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe
- Helen Czerski, Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life
- Barry Mazur, Imagining Numbers
- Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science
2016
- Eric Scerri, A Tale of Seven Elements
- William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
- Nick Lane, The Vital Question, Why Is Life The Way It Is?
- Reviel Netz, The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity’s Greatest Scientist
- Alan Hirshfeld, Starlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe
- Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History
- Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
- Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
- Dava Sobel, Longitude
- Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz, The Techno-Human Condition
- John L. Heilborn, Galileo
- Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents
2015
- Joseph Needham, Science & Civilization, Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology
- R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
- Jo Marchant, Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer and the Century-Long Search to Discover its Secrets
- Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
- Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
- Marcus du Sautoy, The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest
2014
- Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
- Noson S. Yanofsky, The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us
- Jim al-Khalili, The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge
- Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy
- Philip Ball, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything
- Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon and other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
- Henry Petroski, To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure
- Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter, The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers About Danger
- Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
- Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World; optional reading G.H. Hardy, Orders of Infinity: The `Infinitärcalcül’ of Paul Du Bois-Reymond
2013
- Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus.
- Mario Livio, Brilliant Blunders
- Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts