The Christmas That Santa Got His Geek On

This year I received a lot of geek books for Christmas (2009), and I'm so delighted and intrigued by them that I thought I'd share them here and maybe somebody else will discover a wonderful book to read.

These are the six books I received:

1. The Code Book, The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, by Simon Singh
2. Train Man, the novel, by Hitori Nakano
3. Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife
4. The Geek Atlas, 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive, by John Graham-Cunningham
5. The Annotated Turing, A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, by Charles Petzold
6. e: the Story of a Number, by Eli Manor

I haven't had time to read any of the books yet, but have thumbed through all of them enough to give a brief overview and my first impression of the quality of the book. It should be noted that these books were all on my Amazon.com wish list (thanks to Amazon for suggesting them for me) and I've read the reviews and any excerpts that were available.

The book that I've given the most attention to so far is The Code Book, and that's because I have three puzzles to solve. After my brother-in-law saw that I'd received a cryptography book, he asked if I like that sort of stuff and then promptly produced printouts for three puzzles he needs to solve to be able to locate geocaches. (I've solved two so far and one is partially solved)

The Code Book is a pleasure to flip through because it's packed with illustrations, examples, photos and more. I find it impossible not to stop on pages with interesting graphics to read a little and what I've discovered so far are troves of ciphers and codes interspersed with interesting stories about the circumstances and people involved in those discoveries. Case in point, the curious turn of circumstances that lead Whitfield Diffie to spontaneously hop in his car and drive 5,000 km "to meet the only person who seemed to share his obsession," Martin Hellman, thus setting the stage for the Diffe-Hellman-Merkle key exchange.

The pages I've read in this book have been engaging and educational, and the math is minimal so as not to off put the less mathematically-inclined reader. I happily give a hearty thumbs up to The Code Book.

Train Man is a very unusual novel. This is the only book on the list that Amazon didn't suggest for me. Instead, this suggestion came from a fellow Twitter user named @rodet . What makes Train Man different from standard novels is that it takes place as an online conversation between Japanese Internet chatroom participants. It follows the story of a geeky young man and a young woman he meets, charting the progress of their relationship. The Asian emoticons and ascii art used throughout the chats are nifty and will require some deciphering. This book would definitely not be for everyone because of the unusual format, but I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy it.

On the back cover of Zero is written, "The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshipped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics." I never realized that the number zero had such a history. This book looks at the uses and misuses of the number zero throughout history and the current controversy surrounding it. The book has quite a few illustrations and some math, but not too much. I think it will be an interesting read. The last appendix is titled "Make Your Own Wormhole Time Machine."

The Geek Atlas is a fun book highlighting "128 destinations around the world where breakthroughs in science, mathematics, or technology occurred - or are happening now." The book gives a few pages of information about each site with a web link or other source for more information and when to visit. There are a lot of places included that I'm not likely to visit, such as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, but many others that would definitely be worth some time and effort to see. It looks like a fun book.

I wasn't expecting The Annotated Turing to be a big page-turner, but am pleasantly surprised at the extensive annotations contained within this book and am thinking my preset notions about annotated works need to be re-evaluated. In quickly flipping through the book, the casual observer might think it's filled with more of the elaborate Asian emoticons as in Train Man, but no, that's math, and a lot of it, and it looks a bit daunting, but it will be great for keeping my brain spry and young.

I'm expecting to particularly enjoy the final book, e: the Story of a Number, in part because I recently finished reading a terrific book, Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire. In thumbing through the book, I discovered a fun section on e and its relationship to music that confirmed my expectations that I should enjoy this book thoroughly. As would be expected, this book contains quite a lot of math and is not for the faint-hearted.

That's it for new books to read. They should keep me busy for quite a while.