Eric Weinstein

After the economic meltdown of 2008, Warren Buffett famously warned, “beware of geeks bearing formulas.” But as James Weatherall demonstrates, not all geeks are created equal. While many of the mathematicians and software engineers on Wall Street failed when their abstractions turned ugly in practice, a special breed of physicists has a much deeper history of revolutionizing finance. Taking us from fin-de-siècle Paris to Rat Pack-era Las Vegas, from wartime government labs to Yippie communes on the Pacific coast, Weatherall shows how physicists successfully brought their science to bear on some of the thorniest problems in economics, from options pricing to bubbles. The crisis was partly a failure of mathematical modeling. But even more, it was a failure of some very sophisticated financial institutions to think like physicists. Models—whether in science or finance—have limitations; they break down under certain conditions. And in 2008, sophisticated models fell into the hands of people who didn’t understand their purpose, and didn’t care. It was a catastrophic misuse of science. The solution, however, is not to give up on models; it's to make them better. Weatherall reveals the people and ideas on the cusp of a new era in finance. We see a geophysicist use a model designed for earthquakes to predict a massive stock market crash. We discover a physicist-run hedge fund that earned 2,478.6% over the course of the 1990s. And we see how an obscure idea from quantum theory might soon be used to create a far more accurate Consumer Price Index. Both persuasive and accessible, The Physics of Wall Street is riveting history that will change how we think about our economic future.

G. H. Hardy was one of this century's finest mathematical thinkers, renowned among his contemporaries as a 'real mathematician ... the purest of the pure'. He was also, as C. P. Snow recounts in his Foreword, 'unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything'. This 'apology', written in 1940 as his mathematical powers were declining, offers a brilliant and engaging account of mathematics as very much more than a science; when it was first published, Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry James's notebooks as 'the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist'. C. P. Snow's Foreword gives sympathetic and witty insights into Hardy's life, with its rich store of anecdotes concerning his collaboration with the brilliant Indian mathematician Ramanujan, his aphorisms and idiosyncrasies, and his passion for cricket. This is a unique account of the fascination of mathematics and of one of its most compelling exponents in modern times.

In ALL THE TROUBLE IN THE WORLD, best-selling humorist P. J. O'Rourke tackles the "fashionable worries"--the enormous global problems that are endlessly in the news and constantly on our minds but about which we mostly don't have a clue. O'Rourke crisscrosses the globe asking not just "What's the answer?" but "What the hell's the question?" In his chapter on overpopulation (titled "Just Enough of Me, Way Too Much of You") he visits first Bangladesh, then Fremont, California. The two places have the same number of people per square mile. Is the problem really that Bangladesh is too crowded? If so, how come George Harrison never held a concert to benefit suburban Californians? For his chapter on famine ("All Guns, No Butter") O'Rourke goes to Somalia and discovers that there's plenty of food, you just have to be armed to get it. He dismisses the self-righteous "anti-hunger" types back home, saying that they "cannot resist a dig at us gluttonous bourgeoisie who've climbed way up on the food chain where we don't belong. I guess they believe that if I don't eat this steak, the cow will come back to life, vomit its corn and silage, and these can be fed to people in Chad." The author travels to the Earth Summit in Rio and lets the hot air out of global warming theorists. He tours the old Communist bloc to ponder why, if government regulation is the answer to pollution, the most government-regulated countries were the most polluted. And while hiking in the Amazon, inspecting our deteriorating environment, he discovers that rain forests are such horrible places that all we have to do to preserve them is give everyone who lives there a chance to drive a New York City cab. O'Rourke examines the faddish issue of multiculturalism by returning to his old college campus, where the air is full of such ideas, and then by going to Bosnia, where minority empowerment has reached its logical conclusion and the air is full of something else entirely.