Books & Articles from Ada's Reading List

On the Web

Try to Remember - A quick look at pi piems, Lu Chao, and the iPod loving kids at the Facing History School.
Secrets of a Mindgamer - A great abstract of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, the unlikely story of how a reporter succumbs to an obsession with memorization, discovers the memory palace and ends up in the finals of the U.S.A. Memory Championship ... but still loses his car keys from time to time.
The Best and the Rest: Revisiting the norm of normality of individual performance - An interesting bit of research on individual performance. Ada will let the paper speak for itself. For a quick overview, take a look at the NPR story titled "Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren't 'Average'" by Shankar Vedantam.

Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant - A unique first-person account that offers a window into the mind of a high-functioning 27-year-old British autistic savant Daniel_Tammet who has Asperger's syndrome. Tammet's ability to think abstractly, deviate from routine, and empathize, interact and communicate with others is impaired, yet he's capable of incredible feats of memorization and mental calculation. Besides being able to effortlessly multiply and divide huge sums in his head with the speed and accuracy of a computer, Tammet, the subject of the 2005 documentary Brainman, learned Icelandic in a single week and recited the number pi up to the 22,514th digit.
A Biography of the World Most Mysterious Number - A delightful layperson's introduction to one of math's most interesting phenomena.