Science books

I have purchased, last weekend, Paul Hoffman's book The Man Who Only Loved Numbers. This is a biography of the great and equally eccentric number theorist of all times Paul Érdös.

The book has been published in 1998, two years after the death of Érdös in Warsaw. The first 25% of Hoffman's book is interesting and entertaining at the same time. It tell the story of a man who devoted his whole life to Mathematics, who travelled from country to country carrying all his belongings in a briefcase and a bag.

I would safely say that the summer of 2012 has been the summer of reading and playing around with different ideas about evolution, cooperation and competition. I have not heard of Martin Nowak until I read his article in Scientific American's July issue. Then, a few weeks later, I was reading about him again in Chaitin's book Proving Darwin. Martin Nowak is a researcher in Mathematics and Biology. He spent most of his research career tackling problems about evolution and evolutionary games mathematically and through numerous computer simulations.

When I stumbled upon this title , I did not hesitate for a second to order it. A mathematical book on the theory of evolution and written by the the famous Gregory Chaitin on top of that. Things looked so promising and I was anxious to get the book by mail.

The first impression when I got the book in my hands was that it was very thin. Though, I did not want to let myself be fooled by the the size.

Proving Darwin aims at introducing a new science founded by Gregory Chaitin himself and called Metabiology. The book describes a toy universe of evolution. A model that,according to Chaitin, captures the essence of evolution yet it remains  simple enough to be tackeled mathematically.