
The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering - aethertap
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-insight-science-and-engineering
======
ics
Wow, a free download of 409pp straight from the MIT Press! Also a nice geek-
warming thanks at the end, with just a little more detail than you'd sometimes
see in the frontmatter (compilation time):

> This book was typeset entirely with free software and fonts. The text is set
> in Palatino, designed by Hermann Zapf and available as TEX Gyre Pagella. The
> headings are set in Latin Modern Sans, based on Computer Modern Sans,
> designed by Donald Knuth. The source files were created with GNU Emacs and
> managed with the Mercurial revision-control system. The figure source files
> were compiled with MetaPost 1.999 and Asymptote 2.31. The TEX source was
> compiled to PDF using ConTeXt 2014.05.17 and LuaTeX 0.79.1. The compilations
> were managed with GNU Make and took 10 minutes on a 2006-vintage Thinkpad
> T60 laptop. All software was running on Debian GNU/Linux. A heartfelt thank
> you to all who contribute to the software commons!

Edit: If anyone here works on the MIT Press website, for some reason I can't
add the paperback item to my cart. When I click the link it takes me to an
empty cart every time (vanilla Chrome, no plugins).

~~~
trippe
Sorry about the problem with the MIT website. Are you running Chrome on Linux?
We have another report of this.

So you are just seeing an empty cart each time? Would you mind trying to
refresh?

Bill Trippe MIT Press

~~~
ics
Chrome (38) on Mac (10.10). Refresh refreshes the page but nothing else. "Your
cart is empty."

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chisophugis
I spent about a week going through Mahajan's OCW course "the art of
approximation" (it's quite short and reads quite quickly). It changed how I
view problem solving and engineering estimation forever.

Grab "entire book" (about 130 pages) at
[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-
comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-
science/6-055j-the-art-of-approximation-in-science-and-engineering-
spring-2008/readings/)

"The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering" looks like a refined and
expanded version of the OCW course. Like 6.055J, I'm sure it can be read
casually and in small pieces. Do yourself the favor of checking out 6.055J or
"The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering" (although see the caveat
below).

Every chapter of 6.055J was mind-blowing for me. The "tree" technique. Using
dimensionless constants. The random walk model of errors (i.e. why
approximations end up being pretty good usually). Easy cases. Etc. A lot of it
is just becoming aware of techniques we already use subconsciously or
awkwardly; hence we learn to systematically and effectively use them.

One small caveat: Some of the content unfortunately doesn't extend super well
into software/programming. Many of the useful properties that enable reasoning
about physical systems (units, conservation laws, symmetry, equilibrium
points/linearization, continuity, etc.) are not applicable to software in
general since "anything is possible" in software. The software is basically in
its own universe that has its own laws completely determined by the
hardware/VM/language/API designers. It communicates with the "real universe"
through very narrow and controlled channels. Some things from the book are
applicable to software, but presented in a way that is strange or not terribly
useful for software (e.g. "proportional reasoning" is just the familiar big-O
reasoning).

~~~
sanjoy
Thank you for the comments. I agree with your caveat about the difficulty in
applying the tools to software or programming. Although invariants are quite
useful in programming too, and abstraction is an essential part of any large
project. But I decided, perhaps wrongly, not to discuss the programming
examples much. For example, an earlier draft had a discussion of abstraction
and used the tree minilanguage that I wrote to make the tree diagrams,
comparing the high-level abstractions it uses with the low-level lines of
postscript or PDF code (near the bottom of the abstraction tower). But it
ended up frightening lots of students, so I didn't include it in the published
book.

-Sanjoy Mahajan

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1064nm
I've read various drafts of this book and it really is fantastic. Rather than
just teaching limited domain knowledge in science and engineering, it teaches
a way to tackle ill-specified problems and how to wrestle out answers to hard
questions.

For the more mathematically inclined there's also a similar previous book by
the same author, also available for free as a pdf:
[http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-
mathematics](http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics)

~~~
aethertap
I can give a strong second to the Street Fighting Mathematics recommendation.
The stuff in there makes math into a thinking tool in a way I haven't seen
anywhere else.

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codexjourneys
Huge thank you for making this book freely available via download. So glad I
clicked through.

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sliverstorm
Just starting this now, but I thought I'd throw in- I've come to believe
engineering has a significant creative element, when you let your mind free
and seek to solve things in completely new ways. I'm excited to see if that is
the kind of thing this book is talking about; it's not certain from the
description.

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jeffreyrogers
This looks great. In case anyone missed it, there is a link in the sidebar to
download the book for free.

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hsgui
Thanks for your link, very interesting!

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delinka
"In this book, Sanjoy Mahajan shows us that the way to master complexity is
through insight rather than precision."

OMG, my high school teachers were so pissed off when I'd attempt to
_understand_ things rather than just _memorize_ what they gave me. College was
only marginally better.

Logical leap: time to return to the Platonic Academy

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kitsune_
Thank you very much.

