Personal

Last Updated: March 23, 2024

What I really like: Chatting, Reading, Writing, Watching Comedies, Hiking, Cooking, Karaoke, Playing Board Games (especially Othello), emoji🤭 😎 😤, Billiards, Fishing, etc.

Reading is one of my hobbies. I read about 200 books a year, excluding books related to my research. Below is a partial list of some of my favorite books and papers. If any of them interest you, I would be happy to discuss them with you!

As a hobby, I have been recently reading the works of L. Boltzmann, M. Planck, A. Einstein, E. Schrödinger, L. de Broglie, A. Kolmogorov, Yoichiro Nambu, N. Chomsky, A. Leggett, R. Dawkins, E. Witten, and others, even though I don’t understand all the details😉. Particularly, I have been interested in the work of the Lwów-Warsaw school of logic, including J. Łukasiewicz, S. Leśniewski, and A. Tarski.

Books (mainly nonfiction) and Papers

• Lorraine Daston, and Peter Galison, (2007), Objectivity
• Thomas S. Kuhn, (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  • “Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. “, “The proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals, all these are symptoms of a transition from normal to extraordinary research. “
  • This book is difficult to read due to the assumption of knowledge in the history of physics, which is not commonly taught in modern physics textbooks, and less rigorous discussion. However, the concept of paradigm is really intriguing and sparked my initial interest in the history and philosophy of science.
• Jose Ortega Y Gasset, 1929, The Revolt of the Mass
  • I particularly enjoyed Chapter 10: Primitivism and History, and Chapter 12: The Barbarism of “Specialization”.
• Yanshou, Li. History of the Southern Dynasties, pp. 5-8『南史』巻二十六　列伝第十六
  • ←I found that this bibliography may not be accurate. The Book of Song (宋書) is accurate.
  • The biography of Yuan Can (袁粲) and the story about 狂泉. Being common or widely believed doesn’t necessarily mean it’s correct. I have studied (modern) Chinese because of my interest in traditional Chinese literature, such as the Analects (论語). Additionally, chatting with Chinese speakers has been a motivating factor for me🙌.
• Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii, (2010), Semiotics of Programming
• Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, (1933), In Praise of Shadows『陰翳礼讃』
• Soseki Natsume, (1914), My Individualism and the Philosophical Foundations of Literature『私の個人主義』
• Gödel, Kurt. (1931), “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I”.
  • On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems.
• Kleene, Stephen C. (1951), “Representation of Events in Nerve Nets and Finite Automata”.
  • Kleene conceived regular expressions to redefine the neural model proposed by McCulloch and Pitts. He first modeled regular events (what we now call regular languages) based on natural circuits, then defined regular expressions as a notation to describe these events, using three operations and earliest units (The concept of Finite Automata came later). The mathematical formulation of natural phenomena attracted me.
• Zemanek, H., (1966), “Semiotics and Programming Languages”
• ACM Turing Award lectures : the first twenty years, 1966 to 1985
• Minsky, Marvin, (1970), “Form and Content in Computer Science”.

Others

• Fictions (I don’t read much fiction🥲. Fact is stranger than fiction…)
  • Abbott, Edwin A. (1884), Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
  • Casti, John L. (1998), The Cambridge Quintet: A Work of Scientific Speculation
    • A unique fiction written by a complexity scientist known for Paradigms Lost and Complexification. Snow, Turing, Wittgenstein, Haldane (a geneticist), and Schrödinger discuss topics related to artificial intelligence. There is no such discussion in terms of historical facts, but the content is solid to some extent. At the end of the book, there is a brief but well-organized history of artificial intelligence until the 1990s.
• Movies
• Music
• Quotes
  • [D]o not follow in my footsteps or in the footsteps of anybody else. Rather make a path of your own choosing, in directions which interest you most at the time. If you feel most comfortable with the established curriculum or the conventional career, I wish you the best of success in it. But if your interests or opportunities lead you in unusual directions, do not be afraid to stray from the general norm. If you think hard how to generalize your earlier learning and experiences, you will profit from them in the most unexpected ways. Everyone in this wide world has a different variety that we all need to foster and develop, to ensure the continued progress of human knowledge, the continuous renewal of our various cultures, and the ultimate prosperity and happiness of our human race. (Tony Hoare, “Stories from a Life in Interesting Times”, 2001)
  • Not only children, but people in general, and scientists in particular, quickly forget what it was like not to know what they now know. That is, once you’ve solved a problem, especially when the solution involved a new approach, it’s difficult to think about the problem in the old way. What was once unknown has become obvious. What once tested the ingenuity of the skilled practitioner is now “an exercise left to the student”. (Michael S. Mahoney, “What Makes History?”, 1996)
  • L. Wittgenstein: “A person caught in a philosophical confusion is like a man in a room who wants to get out but doesn’t know how. He tries the window but it is too high. He tries the chimney but it is too narrow. And if he would only turn around, he would see that the door has been open all the time!” (Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2001, p.44)
  • All the time you’re saying to yourself, “I could do that, but I won’t” – which is just another way of saying that you can’t. (Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, 1985, p.33)
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