Book recommendations 2021

Summary

In 2021, things started to take off. Covid is not as scary as it seemed to be and people started going out. I passed the free time reading adventure and machine learning books. These are my top 10 favourite books of 2021.

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

This book remains to today, the best book i have ever read. It contains all my favorite category mixed into a single funny, chilling and inspiring novel. All the characters presented in this masterpiece, live their own lives, play by their own rules and seek to fulfill their own aspirations. Not to forget the intricacies created, when protagonists with different goals interact. Even the love stories in this novel were compeling.

A Promised Land - Barack Obama

This book was released just after i finished reading “Becoming” by Michael Obama. It tells the biography of Barack Obama just before his election in 2008 till his first presidential term. Just as it dwells into the intricacies of the presidencies, it also explains the toll it takes on one’s personal life. This novel has been very inspiring, seeing life from the point of view of the most powerful president of earth.

Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama

This book was an unexpected find and is a precursor to the latest book by the same author. It is a biography of Barack Obama from the days of this childhood, to his studies of law, his marriage and the birth of their first child. The most intriging part of the book is the coming of age section, as he dweals into understanding the decision of his parent as a young adult. His travel to Africa, the interpretation of success and poverty from different society’s point of view was also a very interesting to look into as a person with African origins.

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir - Natasha Trethewey

At 19, Natasha had her world breaking apart, when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronts the twin pulls of life and the death in the aftermath of this unimaginable trauma and now explorers the way this experience lastingly shapes the artist she becaume.

A great book, it also shows life from a point of view of a woman and what interaction of the opposite sex is actually like.

Applied Optimal Control - Jr. Arthur E. Bryson/ Yu-Chi Ho

A book about optimization problems and how to solve them. It teaches how to solved diverse problems from dynamic control using first, second optimization method. Moreover it dwelves into the theory of differential games, random processes, interpolation and smoothing. For a engineer, this book could be a little overwhelming, but for a mathematician, it regorges great example to apply already-discovered theorems.

La Nuit - Ellie Wiesel

La Nuit, the Night is a 1960 memoir of author, based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944-1945, toward the end of the Second World War.
In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, the author writes about his loss of faith and increasing disgust with humanity, recounting his experienecs from the Nazi-established ghettos in his hometown in Sighet, Romania, to high migration through multiple concentration camps.

Machine Learning: A Bayesian and Optimization Perspective - Sergios Theodoridis

Starting from basic mathematical methods, such as mean square, least squares and maximum likelihood methods, Bayesian decision theory classification, logistic regression and decision trees, it progresses to more recent methods in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and support vector machines, Bayesion inference, Monte Carlo methods and probabilistic graphical models, hiddeb Markov model and particle filtering. Dimension reduction and laten variables modelling are also considered in depth.

It concludes with an extended chapter on neural networks and deep learning architectures. This book also covers the fundamentals of statistical parameter estimation, Wiener and Kalman filtering, convexity and convex optimization. It is a must-read for every machine-learning enthusiat.

Pattern Recognition - Sergios Theodoridis

With another amazing book, Mr. Theodoridis considers classical and current theory, as well as practice of supervised, unsuppervised and semi-supervised pattern recognition, to build a complete background for professionals and students of engineering.

Concepts are readily and throughoutly explained, attached to clear and understandable images and graphs. This book is the perfect introduction into the theory of machine lerning and neural networks.

More books will be added in the future … Can’t find the rest of my list.