Here are 100 books that The Tiger That Isn't fans have personally recommended if you like
The Tiger That Isn't.
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I am a scientist in the field of medicine, and I like to read books that provide a surprising insight into our thinking and decision-making with a scientific basis. It is special how we think we are acting rationally while much of our action is influenced by the environment and news that comes our way. Some of the books in my list provide special insights that are refreshing and hold a mirror up to us.
It's amazing how our thinking is influenced by a biased statement. This book shows that there is still hope when you look at the real facts.
The author asks a number of questions that require basic knowledge of everyday data that we read a lot about in the press. Questions such as: "How many people in the world are illiterate?" or "How many women are not educated?" are answered incorrectly by politicians, bankers, and scientists, those who determine our policy.
It is confronting to realize that more questions could have been answered correctly by simply guessing.
'A hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases.' BARACK OBAMA
'One of the most important books I've ever read - an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.' BILL GATES
*#1 Sunday Times bestseller * New York Times bestseller * Observer 'best brainy book of the decade' * Irish Times bestseller * Guardian bestseller * audiobook bestseller *
Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.
When asked simple questions about global trends - why the world's population is increasing; how…
As a writer and historian, I’m all about rabbit holes. When something I’ve never heard about before catches my interest, I have to find out more—and sometimes I end up writing whole books on the subject! I have a head full of bizarre little nuggets of information, and I love reading books, like the ones here, that tell me something new and change my way of thinking.
Quirkology has a whole chapter on jokes, and the search for the funniest one. I listened to this as an audiobook and did a lot of chortling while I was out walking. (Fortunately there weren’t too many people around.)
But there’s also plenty of serious and handy stuff, about whether you can tell when you are being lied to, what makes some people “luckier” than others, and what to talk about during speed dating. (Men should talk about travel, not films, if they want to make a connection with the opposite sex.)
There’s also a section on nominative determinism (your name defining your destiny), and the irony was not lost on author and researcher, Dr. Wiseman.
For over twenty years, psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman has examined the quirky science of everyday life. In Quirkology, he navigates the backwaters of human behavior, discovering the tell-tale signs that give away a liar, the secret science behind speed-dating and personal ads, and what a persons sense of humor reveals about the innermost workings of their mind- all along paying tribute to others who have carried out similarly weird and wonderful work. Wisemans research has involved secretly observing people as they go about their daily business, conducting unusual experiments in art exhibitions and music concerts, and even staging fake sances…
History is nearly always relegated to heavy tomes and stuffy museum rooms. Learning about our past seems no longer important, and we keep promoting it in such uncool and unsexy ways. I feel any of our histories, with either a capital or lower case ‘h’, whether focused on big world events or local life, deserve to be told in a special kind of way, with that sprinkle of “magic realism” only fiction authors can deliver. Alternative history, historical fiction, magic fabulism, they are the sides of the same dice creating new, different stories inspired by our collective memory of things that have happened. These books touch this topic so dear to me.
Here we enter the topic of time travel, a concept very dear to me from both a fictional, moral, and scientific point of view. Many novels have attempted to show how one change in the past could change our future. Elton’s novel struck me for its originality in picking a notorious historical event largely ignored by fiction when it comes to time travel and alternate history. The assassination of the Franz Ferdinand of Austria is used not just as the spark of World War I but as the start of the ideological and warmongering terror that would spread through Europe. The novel is an example of man’s fixation with trying to find one cause for all problems when maybe there are multiple causes going back years and years. The search is as vain as the main character’s attempts to change history.
It's the 1st of June 1914 and Hugh Stanton, ex-soldier and celebrated adventurer is quite literally the loneliest man on earth. No one he has ever known or loved has been born yet. Perhaps now they never will be.
Stanton knows that a great and terrible war is coming. A collective suicidal madness that will destroy European civilization and bring misery to millions in the century to come. He knows this because, for him, that century is already history.
Somehow he must change that history. He must prevent the war. A war that will begin with a single bullet. But…
As a writer and historian, I’m all about rabbit holes. When something I’ve never heard about before catches my interest, I have to find out more—and sometimes I end up writing whole books on the subject! I have a head full of bizarre little nuggets of information, and I love reading books, like the ones here, that tell me something new and change my way of thinking.
This clever and funny book explains that there are specific techniques that make good writing sound good, or a pithy phrase stick in the mind, and tells you the long and difficult Greek (or slightly easier Latin) names for all these rules you kind of knew without actually knowing.
I can hardly retain any of the Greek labels, but I do remember the fun little examples, like why Oscar Wilde’s epigrams are so striking (antithesis) and how Shakespeare totally lifted part ofJulius Caesarfrom a historian, but polished it up (alliteration). And whenever you hear a memorable three-part phrase, it was probably longer but everyone forgot the other bits (tricolon).
This is not one for fans of utilitarian writing, but as Forsyth says, “To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.”
From the #1 international bestselling author of The Etymologicon and The Horologicon comes an education in the art of articulation, from the King James Bible to Katy Perry…
From classic poetry to pop lyrics, from Charles Dickens to Dolly Parton, even from Jesus to James Bond, Mark Forsyth explains the secrets that make a phrase—such as “O Captain! My Captain!” or “To be or not to be”—memorable.
In his inimitably entertaining and wonderfully witty style, he takes apart famous phrases and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or quip like Oscar Wilde. Whether you’re aiming to achieve literary…
A noted quantitative hedge fund manager and quant finance author, Ernie is the founder of QTS Capital Management and Predictnow.ai. Previously he has applied his expertise in machine learning at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center’s Human Language Technologies group, at Morgan Stanley’s Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence Group, and at Credit Suisse’s Horizon Trading Group. Ernie was quoted by Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, and the CIO magazine, and interviewed on CNBC’s Closing Bell program. He is an adjunct faculty at Northwestern University’s Master’s in Data Science program and supervises student theses there. Ernie holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.
I have used this book to teach my Financial Risk Analytics course at Northwestern University for many years. As a textbook, it is surprisingly easy to read, and the abundant exercises are great. This would be a foundational text to read after you have read my own books. It puts you on solid ground to understand all the financial babble that you may read elsewhere. It includes extensive coverage of most basic topics important to a serious quantitative trader, while not being overly mathematical. Easily understandable if you have basic programming and math background from first year of university.
Everything is practical in this book, which isn’t what you would expect from a textbook! There is no math for math’s sake. I have used the techniques discussed in this book for real trading, and for creating features at my machine learning SaaS predictnow.ai. Examples: What’s the difference between net…
The new edition of this influential textbook, geared towards graduate or advanced undergraduate students, teaches the statistics necessary for financial engineering. In doing so, it illustrates concepts using financial markets and economic data, R Labs with real-data exercises, and graphical and analytic methods for modeling and diagnosing modeling errors. These methods are critical because financial engineers now have access to enormous quantities of data. To make use of this data, the powerful methods in this book for working with quantitative information, particularly about volatility and risks, are essential. Strengths of this fully-revised edition include major additions to the R code…
I am a financial data scientist. I think it is important that data scientists are highly specialized if they want to be effective in their careers. I run a business called Conlan Scientific out of Charlotte, NC where me and my team of financial data scientists tackle complicated machine learning problems for our clients. Quant trading is a gladiator’s arena of financial data science. Anyone can try it, but few succeed at it. I am sharing my top five list of math books that are essential to success in this field. I hope you enjoy.
One of my favorite professors, Gretchen Martinet, used this to teach a course called “Mathematical Statistics” when I was at the University of Virginia. It is an extremely profound course full of dense but fundamental mathematical proofs in classical statistics.
You will learn why the formula for the normal distribution is the way it is, why the sum of squares appears everywhere in statistics, and how to fit a linear regression by hand. In the same way calculus elevates our understanding of rates of changes, the book elevates your understanding of samples, averages, and distributions. Quant trading requires an intuitive sense of how data, models, and aggregates work, making this content essential for your success.
Modern Mathematical Statistics with Applications, Second Edition strikes a balance between mathematical foundations and statistical practice. In keeping with the recommendation that every math student should study statistics and probability with an emphasis on data analysis, accomplished authors Jay Devore and Kenneth Berk make statistical concepts and methods clear and relevant through careful explanations and a broad range of applications involving real data.
The main focus of the book is on presenting and illustrating methods of inferential statistics that are useful in research. It begins with a chapter on descriptive statistics that immediately exposes the reader to real data. The…
Tim Harford is the author of nine books, including The Undercover Economist and The Data Detective, and the host of the Cautionary Tales podcast. He presents the BBC Radio programs More or Less, Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy, and How To Vaccinate The World. Tim is a senior columnist for the Financial Times, a member of Nuffield College, Oxford, and the only journalist to have been made an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.
I should declare an interest here: I present a BBC Radio show that Blastland and Dilnot created. This book was effectively my “how to” manual on the way into the studio that they had vacated. It’s a wise and varied guide to the power and the pitfalls of data, poetically written and full of subtle wisdoms.
The Strunk and White of statistics team up to help the average person navigate the numbers in the news
Drawing on their hugely popular BBC Radio 4 show More or Less, journalist Michael Blastland and internationally known economist Andrew Dilnot delight, amuse, and convert American mathphobes by showing how our everyday experiences make sense of numbers.
The radical premise of The Numbers Game is to show how much we already know and give practical ways to use our knowledge to become cannier consumers of the media. If you've ever wondered what "average" really means, whether the scare stories about cancer…
I’ve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Plato’s Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering.
I found a copy of this book in the sixties. That copy, much loved, was lost in moves and mayhem. Now, I only have a Dover reprint (water-logged during yet another move), but I have never been without and would search high and low if I were.
This is also a history of probability but with a very different focus. Ms. David was a statistician able to explain the calculations intuitively (good to assign to my students). But she was also thoroughly interested in the personalities involved. What was Galileo like? What happened to Pascal at Port-Royal?
I felt personally drawn into the historical narrative that often reads like a novel.
The development of gambling techniques led to the beginning of modern statistics, and this absorbing history illustrates the science's rise with vignettes from the lives of Galileo, Fermat, Pascal, and others. Fascinating allusions to the classics, archaeology, biography, poetry, and fiction endow this volume with universal appeal. 1962 edition.
I started my career as a research scientist building machine learning algorithms for weather forecasting. Twenty years later, I found myself at a precision agriculture startup creating models that provided guidance to farmers on when to plant, what to plant, etc. So, I am part of the movement from academia to industry. Now, at Google Cloud, my team builds cross-industry solutions and I see firsthand what our customers need in their data science teams. This set of books is what I suggest when a CTO asks how to upskill their workforce, or when a graduate student asks me how to break into the industry.
What if you are faced with a problem for which a standard approach doesn’t yet exist? In such a case, you will need to be able to figure out the approach from the first principles. This book will help you learn how to derive insights starting from raw data.
'A statistical national treasure' Jeremy Vine, BBC Radio 2
'Required reading for all politicians, journalists, medics and anyone who tries to influence people (or is influenced) by statistics. A tour de force' Popular Science
Do busier hospitals have higher survival rates? How many trees are there on the planet? Why do old men have big ears? David Spiegelhalter reveals the answers to these and many other questions - questions that can only be addressed using statistical science.
Statistics has played a leading role in our scientific understanding of the world for centuries, yet we are all familiar with the way…
I’m a historian who’s spent far too much time thinking about how the color magenta contributed to climate change and why eighteenth-century humanitarians were obsessed with tobacco enemas. My favorite historical topics—like sensation, color, and truth—don’t initially seem historical, but that’s exactly why they need to be explored. I’ve learned that the things that seem like second nature are where our deepest cultural assumptions and unconscious biases hide. In addition to writing nonfiction, I’ve been lucky enough to grow up on a ranch, live in Paris, work as an interior design writer, teach high school and college, and help stray dogs get adopted.
I had never really given much thought to counting until I read this book, but in the very first chapter, Stone made me rethink everything I thought I knew about “one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.” She shows that every time we count, we’re making cultural assumptions. For example, what counts as a fish? And what makes the color of the fish more relevant than other features? Counting reveals that while these choices may seem intuitive, basic, and meaningless, they have very real impacts on people’s lives. Especially when we use numbers to measure things like merit, poverty, race, and productivity, those fundamental assumptions matter more than we care to admit.
Early in her extraordinary career, Deborah Stone wrote Policy Paradox, a landmark work on politics. Now, in Counting, she revolutionises how we approach numbers and shows how counting shapes the way we see the world. Most of us think of counting as a skill so basic that we see numbers as objective, indisputable facts. Not so, says Stone. In this playful-yet-probing work, Stone reveals the inescapable link between quantifying and classifying, and explains how counting determines almost every facet of our lives-from how we are evaluated at work to how our political opinions are polled to whether we get into…
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