100 Books Like Cornell University, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, No. III. The Cult of Asklepios

I’ve read this book more times than I can count.

Hell, I think I actually wore the pages out, if that’s even possible. When I was younger, I went back to it like a lab rat hitting the lever for a pellet—each parable connecting another dot. To me, the mystery was life, the teacher the universe, and I was the student—albeit a lousy one. 

The Alchemist is one of those rare novels that feels both timeless and uncomfortably personal. At its foundation, it’s about following your own path—trusting the itch of intuition and chasing something bigger than yourself, even when it feels a little foolhardy in the moment.

What I love is how Coelho cuts through with fable-like simplicity: those who love walking go farther than those who love the destination—and they usually learn a hell of a lot more if they’re paying attention. 

I recommend it because it doesn’t… show more.

Emily Bronte wrote one novel in her short life, but what an amazing novel it is. The anti-heroes Heathcliff (rough, bitter, and rude from early mistreatment) and his childhood beloved, Catherine (spoiled and willful), are unique in fiction, and when they go head-to-head, there’s no stopping them. But Bronte doesn’t make it easy to understand them.

Heathcliff obsessively pursues Catherine after she’s married, but what she feels for him has been debated by many scholars, such as myself–some say it’s not sexual, but I disagree. The scene where they finally kiss and cling to each other while she is eight months pregnant with her husband’s child, right before her death, was extremely shocking to the Victorian public. It was so powerful that it scared me when I first read it at age 14.

My grandparents were Irish, which explains why Celtic mythology speaks to me. I hadn’t heard of Dream Angus (aka Aengus) until I read this book, by which time it was too late to quiz my ancestors on this impish Eros, golden-haired bearer of dreams. It was said that sometimes he kissed lovers and, when they parted, the kisses turned into songbirds who followed them home, serenading them with love songs. The author intersperses his telling of the legend with contemporary stories set in Scotland where one of the characters is especially influenced by an aspect of Dream Angus’s personality, sometimes good, sometimes quite the opposite. Angus lives on in a lullaby recorded, among others, by Barbara Dickson. It’s both haunting and sweet, just as love can be.

To some, lucid dreaming (realising you’re in a dream while still dreaming), might come naturally. But if it hasn’t, and you’re willing to spend three weeks practising the techniques, the benefits are well worth it. These include: learning to banish nightmares; developing one’s powers of choice and control; healing and restoring aspects of one’s personality that are limiting personal growth. I used to keep a dream journal, mainly to check whether any dream had been predictive, but lucid dreaming is a completely different ball game, aimed at transforming one’s everyday life. As a writer, I am particularly interested in the benefit of boosting creativity. This is a book for really serious dreamers.

Visual representations are not the only pathway to creative acts in art and science, but they are responsible for large territories of creativity – including, and surprisingly, the mathematical. Arthur Miller shows how ‘seeing the unseen’ becomes possible from atoms to the conservation of energy in science, and from modernism to cubism in art. The book itself is as visually striking as its contents and helped me to think through why the visual metaphor – ‘Oh, I see!’ – becomes the standard description of the moment of insight.

Polya was a great mathematician who knew what counted (after all, he made major contributions to combinatorics, the mathematics of counting). He thought hard about what he was doing when working on problems in mathematics, developing a mental process that lead to creative breakthroughs and solutions. Polya’s problem-solving method is broadly applicable to domains other than mathematics, and this book features many nice puzzles to improve your thinking.

Algorithm design is challenging because it often requires flashes of sudden insight which seem to come out of the blue. But there is a way of thinking about problems that make such flashes more likely to happen. I try to teach this thought process in my books, but Polya got there first.

This is a fascinating analysis of the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Gilbert, Boyle, and Newton. It not only establishes the reasons for the triumph of the modern perspective but also accounts for certain limitations in this view that continue to characterize contemporary scientific thought.

A criticism as well as a history of the change that made possible the rise of modern science, this volume is also a guide to understanding the methods and accomplishments of the great philosopher-scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Have you ever been to a mathematics lecture where the speaker wore a tuxedo and baffled the audience with his mystifying knowledge of numbers? Well, I have and the speaker was Arthur Benjamin, who combined mathematics and magic. He even displayed this knowledge with Stephen Colbert on his earlier show The Colbert Report. It is our good fortune that he describes much of this mathematical wizardry in this fascinating book. 

Math is so much more than algebra.

Steve Strogatz is our generation’s poet laureate of math. I could not put this book down because, although I use math daily, I was amazed at how Strogatz connects everything to everyday experience. Just one example: Hardly anyone gets told about “group theory” in high school because it’s “too advanced”—but here we find it beautifully illustrated with the problem of flipping your mattress twice a year.

This book will help you have your own ideas by opening your eyes to a world of things that just make better sense through the lens of careful analysis, the interplay of the visual and the symbolic, and (just enough) abstraction.

I love all of Eugenia’s books, she is a cool mathematician working to educate the public about real mathematics – a subject of deep explorations and connected ideas.

Eugenia shares the creativity in mathematics, and the importance of pushing against boundaries, including the gender boundaries that often stop girls and women going forward in STEM. Her playful use of mathematical ideas to disrupt the myths of narrow and inequitable mathematics and the dominance of men in the field, is so fascinating, especially for those of us perturbed by the inequities in STEM.

This is a great book for those who would like to love mathematics a little more than they do now.