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People I Absolutely Love Reading

Overall

  • Erwin Schrodinger (in My View of The World and Science and The Greeks)
  • Richard Fortey (in Earth: An Intimate History and Life: Natural History of First Four Billion Years)
  • Howard Stein
  • Erik Curiel

Prose

  • David Abram
  • James Clerk Maxwell
  • William Wordsworth
  • Lord Dunsany
  • Bertrand Russell

Explanatory Transparency

  • Roger Penrose
  • Robert Wald
  • Moritz Schlik

Major Influences (in reverse chronological order)

  • Penrose: Reading him showed me that my aphantasia can be an asset while engaging with abstract thoughts - he converted me into a hand-drawn diagram-based thinker. Through reading his discussions of phase spaces (in Emeperor’s New Mind), Fibre Bundles (in Roads to Reality) and Spinors (in Spinors and Spacetime) I developed a more intimate understanding of some wonderfully useful scientific structures.
  • Douglas Hofstader’s discussion of Godel in GEB: Completely changed my relationship with certainty, rigour, intellectual humility and inspired in me a ‘playful’ approach to exploring beliefs (that in-retrospect one could identify with meta-modernity)
  • Russell: I respect him immensely as a mathematician and polymath. He inspired the first step I took from worrying about epistemology to engaging sincerely with metaphysics
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