
Read the masters - fpereiro
http://www.federicopereiro.com/masters/
======
AndrewO
Or, if the masters are too hard at first, see if their pupils have written
annotations. I tried Turing, couldn't even understand why what he was talking
about was important (or why his "computers" seem so much... lamer than the
ones I was used to), and then found Charles Petzold's "Annotated Turing".

<http://www.charlespetzold.com/AnnotatedTuring/>

He takes Turing's "On Computable Numbers..." and mixes in chapters giving the
necessary background on the history of mathematics, number theory, logic, etc.
in-line (albeit, it takes about 100 pages to get to the first sentence of
Turing's paper). I whole-heartedly recommend it.

~~~
nonviable
Another vote for The Annotated Turing. Really does a great job of shedding
light on a rather esoteric paper.

------
cruise02
> Another thing that resonated deeply with me was how Newton studied a book by
> a French mathematician (I don’t remember which one): he started reading the
> book – when he found it too hard, he started over. That’s what he did until
> he understood the whole thing. So, he didn’t go and read something more
> basic, or tried to found someone who could explain it. He just stayed with
> the source until he groked it.

Approach this advice with caution. Yes, it might work great if you're working
with a great book that has good coverage of all the fundamentals of the topic
and presents it in a logical order. Many books don't do this. Starting over
when you get stuck can just throw you into an endless loop if the required
information just isn't in the book you picked to learn from. Know when to
branch out to other sources of information instead of looping back. Don't be
afraid to make a quick interlude to Wikipedia if you need to.

(Personally, I prefer to just backtrack to the information I missed instead of
starting over from scratch. Starting over seems to waste a lot of time, but if
you missed one concept, there's a chance you missed more.)

~~~
silentbicycle
Indeed. Many brilliant, groundbreaking work is produced by geniuses who are
lousy writers, so sometimes secondary sources are necessary to get past
roadblocks.

Still, it's a good reminder to _try_ reading primary sources, when so many
people seem to be learning from screencasts and blog posts three degrees
removed from them.

~~~
silentbicycle
"Many brilliant, groundbreaking work is produced...lousy writers." I, um,
yeah. Oops.

------
rokhayakebe
Or the "original communicators." When you start to read the _masters_ of every
field, you realize they are in some sort of a _conversation_ that spans
centuries and you get to participate. One problem with this approach is these
are _dead teachers_ so no question & answer session for you, and usually the
material is hard to comprehend at first. That is exactly what you need it, a
material that elevates you, something that pushes you from _understanding less
to understanding more_. Lastly, during this exercise you will find amazingly
that there are really only a few original teachers and that most of what we
read today are simply digest of what was originally written and discovered by
a handful of experts. So it is probably in your best interest to take it
straight from the horse's mouth.

Yes, I am repeating Adler's How To Read.

~~~
drostie
One of my favorite stories in this vein:

You may know that we often read Plato but never read Socrates, and you might
have wondered why the hell we don't go back to the 'originals'. Reading
Plato's dialogue "Phaedrus" gives an answer near the end: Socrates apparently
believed "that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of
the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they
preserve a solemn silence." Socrates of course was famous for using questions
to try and ferret out truth; the idea that you _couldn't have a conversation_
with a book seemed to make Socrates very cautious. He expresses other concerns
as well: that memory must be exercised to be strong, and that writing would
thus lead to a weakening of memory; also that writing makes it easier to
pretend to know something which you don't really understand; and that people
will write texts which cannot be used to learn the subject but only can be
used as an aid to remember it.

Thus ironically, Socrates seemed to believe that books would end the existence
of knowledge. This presumably was the reason that he never wrote down his own
philosophy, and his students had to do it for him.

~~~
abecedarius
Feynman had some similar advice to not read too much. He'd get just the basic
idea, stop reading, and try to solve the problem himself. There's a similar
anecdote about Turing. You don't have to be a genius to profit from this
approach, though of course it affects how far you can take it.

------
EricDeb
I actually believe the mindset this author has (along with many university
professors) makes learning far more difficult for students and discourages
them from staying in STEM (math and science) degrees.

I have consistently found that for me to tackle difficult concepts I need
multiple points of view, specifically views that simplify the topic
tremendously. My professors never encouraged me to seek multiple sources and
usually pushed overly complex, decades-old textbooks on my peers and I. The
"masters" typically write to a niche, university-based audience and do not
tailor their original works for the masses.

I certainly agree that if one wants a complete understanding of a field or
subject they should eventually study original works, however to encourage them
as a starting or leverage point for understanding difficult subjects is poor
advice in my opinion.

~~~
pm90
I completely agree. As a high-school student, I was completely turned off by
the quality of books that I was reading ('textbooks that conform to the
curriculum set by the education board'). It was only when I started reading
the masters (in this case Resnick Halliday for physics, Thomas & Finney for
calculus) that I really started to like math and physics and chose to major in
engineering

------
SiVal
More silly, macho, "real programmer" nonsense. It's like saying that the best
way to learn calculus is to pick up a calculus book in first grade and read it
over and over until it all becomes clear. Yeah, that's the express lane to
mastery.

If you want to master something, sequentially master its prerequisites and
methodically work your way up. If you do that, then a lot of the ideas of the
masters will have begun occurring to you before you even read their works, and
you will be the sort of person they were writing for.

~~~
jasomill
Trouble with this is that _prerequisites differ._ I taught myself
multivariable calculus out of a differential geometry textbook that I lacked
roughly an entire degree's worth of "prerequisites" to, in order to pass a
bog-standard calculus course, because I found the ostensibly "easier" approach
advocated by the undergraduate calc book utterly incomprehensible.

------
shizzy0
When he writes that Newton too just read and re-read through the Master's,
he's wrong.

"How Newton was introduced to the most advanced mathematical texts of his day
is slightly less clear. According to de Moivre, Newton's interest in
mathematics began in the autumn of 1663 when he bought an astrology book at a
fair in Cambridge and found that he could not understand the mathematics in
it. Attempting to read a trigonometry book, he found that he lacked knowledge
of geometry and so decided to read Barrow's edition of Euclid's Elements."

<http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Newton.html>

When Newton failed to grasp something, he backtracked. When he failed to
understand that, he backtracked again. I think many people when confronted
with a failure of understanding may be disinclined, throw their hands up, and
say, this isn't for me. Newton, instead, continued to work his way back up the
chain until he found material that helped him understand.

I think this article does a disservice to the lessons we might learn from
Newton by suggesting that he just smashed his head against the same book until
he understood it.

~~~
brodney
I think the argument here isn't to reread a trigonometry book until you get
it, regardless of your knowledge of the prereqs. The message I took is to find
the book written by a/the master in the field of trigonometry, living or dead,
in order to learn trig. If you don't yet understand geometry which is needed
to understand trig, then find a book by the most renowned scholar in geometry.

It's sort of like that telephone game we play in elementary school, where the
message gets passed around the room and ends up nothing like it started. Learn
from the source of these insights, not from someone else who learned it and is
giving you their interpretation.

------
ekm2
A few days ago,i stumbled on Newton's Principia in my college library, and i
could not help noticing how accessible he was relative to his pupils.On the
very first page,he gives only one rule for finding derivatives that applies in
ALL cases plus worked out examples on how it works.I felt like i had wasted
too much of my time in college reading too many useless tomes.

~~~
hardy263
Can you explain what rule this is? I'm highly curious as to what rule can
solve all derivatives, and it might be useful for me.

~~~
shasta
f'(x) = lim h->0 (f(x+h)-f(x))/h

~~~
thesnider
If that's the really the rule ekm2 is referencing, the rest of his comment
falls apart. This rule is found in the first section about derivatives in any
college or high school calculus textbook. They lead you on for a good many
pages that calculus problems are actually practically solved by reference to
this equation, then grudgingly admit (after forcing you to use it many times)
that the power rule, among others, exists.

~~~
jasomill
I assume he's referring to this [1], although Newton invented his calculus
because _he_ couldn't use this approach to solve practical problems.

[1]
[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Principles_of...](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Principles_of_Natural_Philosophy_\(1846\)/BookI-I)

------
mjn
Sometimes this leads to a considerably different flavor as well, which is
interesting. Often papers are remembered for their "results", but sometimes
the results are only a small part of the paper, and positioned much
differently by the original author.

This is the case with Turing, for example. If you go by Turing in the
secondary literature, he comes across as very mathematical, formal, rigorous.
Which he was, but he was also very aesthetically oriented, playful, and
philosophical. Many of his original papers are really quite "weird" in a way,
at times even allusive/metaphorical. So you get a bit different view of him if
you read the originals. (Due credit: I was reminded of that in Turing's case
by this article, which aims to convince humanities scholars that they should
read Turing: [http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/why-arent-
we-r...](http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/why-arent-we-reading-
turing))

------
StacyC
I’m not a programmer but I loved this line from the post:

 _But if you don’t mind too much feeling like a baby, and if you can create
some space in your life where you aren’t forced to be an adult, then give the
masters a try._

I think this is very good advice for many things.

------
DanielBMarkham
I can't agree enough with this, except the part about staying with it. I think
sometimes we have to come at the same material from several different
directions before it actually makes sense to us. Perhaps it's our preferred
mode of learning, or maybe just how old we are and our personality types.
Don't know.

So for a long time I avoided a lot of the literary masters. As a programmer, I
thought they were way too artsy and "fluffy" for my tastes. I wanted something
with hard science and boolean logic in it, dammit.

But around 40 I listened to the Learning Company's "Great Authors of the
Western Literary Tradition." It was like a guided tour of a huge amount of
masterpieces. From this overview i could pick and choose what to consume. As I
read each work, i had already been "prepped" by listening to a lecturer
describe what made the work so outstanding.

So I picked up "Anna Karenina" Wow! Tolstoy could sketch a character like
nobody else. I read some Dickinson. What a great, simple, yet complex way she
had of describing inner emotional states!

Still couldn't get all of it. Joyce is on my list, but I procrastinate. I had
another go at Melville and loved it, but I couldn't generate enough momentum
to make it through Moby Dick. Both writing and reading styles have changed.
I'd love to learn Greek and have a go at the true classical works, but I will
never have the time, sadly.

I'm hoping to get another overview or introduction and then make a go at some
of the rest of the material. I've loved reading the literary masters.

What I find is that you need a preparation or background to really absorb and
appreciate the masters. This is the same as having to have a background in
baseball to understand a baseball game. Otherwise, without context, it's very
difficult to understand what parts work, what parts don't, and where the
beauty is. (This is called a liberal education, by the way). The more broad
and deep background you have, the more you can appreciate the masters in many
fields.

Also I'd separate cargo cult liberal arts with actual understanding. To me
there's tons of venues that exist to convince you that you're smarter than
some other slob. They pitch quite a bit of snob appeal. I'd avoid that. You
end up thinking you have class when all you're really doing is running around
in a mob consuming whatever was on NPR last week. To me developing a sense of
what the crowd thinks is beautiful versus truly coming to a personal grip with
the masters is completely missing the point. I'm sure there's a social aspect
to art consumption but to me a true master spans the test of time. While it's
possible that something can be popular today and 100 years from now, for me
using social proof as some form of merit for masterworks is almost
diametrically opposed to the entire concept of what makes art truly great in
the first place.

Fair warning, however: once you start consuming works from the masters it
makes mediocre works hard to stomach. Oddly enough, _bad_ material is fine. I
still love me some pulp fiction and trashy pop music. It's the stuff that
tries to be highbrow but you know is going to be gone with the wind in ten
years that's impossible to take.

~~~
gosu
While I empathize with your aesthetic preferences, I don't think that you're
talking about the same thing as the article. _Everyone_ reads the literary
masters in school. No one reads Newton.

------
Irishsteve
Nice idea, however if you lack fundamental knowledge in an area, prepare for
this.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve23i5K334>

(P.s sorry about the title. I guess thats how they get more eye balls on it).

~~~
fferen
I'm not sure what the purpose of that was. Clearly, you CAN light a small bulb
with a battery and wire, as done in the video and introductory physics classes
everywhere. So... is it the fact that the students were unable to figure out
that the battery produced insufficient power to light the big bulb? That shows
a lack of "fundamental understanding about electricity"? More like a lack of
knowledge about power requirements of household light bulbs.

~~~
Dove
Most of them weren't making a circuit -- just running the wire from one end of
the battery to the base of the bulb. That shows a very fundamental lack of
understanding of what's going on, without even getting into things like the
power requirements of the bulb.

~~~
alberich
I'm not sure they lack such understanding. Isn't this what psychologists call
cognitive bias, or something like that? I believe there was a thread here on
HK about it, a study showing that people often do irrational things because
they assume they know everything. You know? People just think "geez, that is
easy..." and rush to answear the first thing that comes to mind, just to
discover that they missed the details and feel really stupid :P

------
eshvk
This is so true: I remember in high school studying calculus from a random
book which made me think that calculus was about was a bunch of tricks for
doing integration and differentiation. A few years later when I first start
working through Spivak's excellent book on Calculus, It was one of the hardest
things I had ever done but the sheer magnificent beauty of the structure on
which most of modern calculus is built on and how it gradually evolved comes
to light. It is really both a journey in history and time and building mental
models that reoccur through so many branches of mathematics.

------
skardan
There is an interesting question. Does the advice "read the masters" also
applies to teaching?

My teacher at university pointed me to Moore's method named by great american
mathematician Robert Lee Moore. Moore selected students without previous
knowledge of the subject and let them "invent" the subject - definition,
theorems, proofs.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Moore#Unusual_teache...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Moore#Unusual_teacher)

So great teachers do not "teach masters" but rather teach to "think like
masters". If you know how to think, "reading the master" feels more like a
dialogue.

------
onemach
The list of the article reminds me of this post
[http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-
papers...](http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers-
should-everyone-read)

------
olalonde
Be cautious when reading the "classics" of fields such as physics or
philosophy (unless you are interested in the history of the field). Socrates
was wrong about a few things and so was Einstein.

------
pbsd
This is just a nitpick, but why is SRP (Wu) in your list? Looks a bit out of
place there.

~~~
fpereiro
That's a very good question!

Although SRP may not be timeless, or even seminal (though I doubt this last
statement), I found this paper to be beautifully written. Its concepts are
very very clear. Above all, the paper seems to be so alive and enjoyable.

For these reasons, besides the practicality of SRP, I suspect that this paper
may well turn out to be a classic.

------
ktizo
Three of the links are broke, here are the working versions for those.

[http://cm.bell-
labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...](http://cm.bell-
labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf)

<http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf>

<http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf>

~~~
fpereiro
Thank you so much for noticing this! I've just corrected the links.

~~~
boltenderus
thanks! for this post...really a nice insight.

