My brain is absolutely hopeless at top-10-like things. But here are a few gems from some of those categories.
Mathematics: John Conway's "On Numbers and Games". (If you've run across the term "surreal numbers", this is the original source. Absolutely gorgeous, but heavy going if you aren't actually a mathematician.) David McKay's "Information theory, inference, and learning algorithms". (What it says on the tin. Don't expect this to be a practical guide to training neural networks or anything like that; it is a mathematics book.)
Philosophy: Derek Parfit's "Reasons and Persons". (Contains some exceptionally clear thinking on thorny questions about personal identity and the like.) Gary Drescher's "Good and Real". (Drescher is primarily a computer-science-and-AI guy rather than a philosopher. He addresses a bunch of hairy philosophical questions from that perspective and I personally like it a lot. I confidently predict that some people will hate it.)
Science: Gnaedig, Honyek & Riley's "200 puzzling physics problems". (Just what it says. Roughly undergraduate-physics level, some easier, some harder.) Steven Vogel's "Life in moving fluids". (Explores, e.g., the very considerable differences in what living in water means for a bacterium and for a whale on account of their different size. Fairly technical; he has other lighter books.)
Computing: Donald Knuth's "TeX: the program". (A single volume of literate code, constituting the whole of his TeX typesetting system. The style is pretty old-fashioned but he's a genius.) Steven Skiena's "The algorithm design manual". (This would not be my recommendation if you want just one algorithms book; that should be Cormen, Rivest, Leiserson & Stein. But it's an excellent complement to a more standard sort of algorithms book.)
Oh wow, thank you for this! I have been fascinated by Information Theory for quite some while now, so I hope David McKay's book is a good introduction to it.
One of my personal favourite in Philosophy is "Finite and Infinite Games" by James P Carse. It had a profound impact on how I look at situations. I hope one of your suggestions does the same :)
Hey I have experience with robotics (ROS1, trying to work on projects using ROS2 now) and autonomous vehicles (mainly Motion Planning & Control and decision making in uncertainties). What are you working on?
> -i probably really should get better running shoes, though running on a gravel road and in private has made it more tolerable
Good running shoes are very under-rated. When I started out a year ago, I didn't bother with shoes as much as I did on beating my previous run time. I noticed I couldn't sustain the routine (I had to take a rest day after 3 or 4 days of running), and very nearly gave up on the habit. Then I bought a pair of comfortable running shoes and it made all the difference in the world. I increased my mileage significantly, and I manage to run 6kms every day of the week without feeling too tired or longing for a rest day.
In the evenings, usually every day. However starting out, it was more like every second or third day, until the feet became stronger and I had learned gradually to run with more finesse, exact landing, and less peak impact with each stride.
When I go out to run, there's no set goal or any pressure. I have a route in mind, but the idea is to just take it easy and bounce along at whatever speed I feel like going. It's like when I used to cross-country ski just for fun.
