favorite books

(Feb 2004, moved from my web page to this blog)

The other day I was browsing and found the web page of Peter Guttman. Apart from knowing a lot about PKI and practical security, I was inspired by his web page. If I was still leaving in Quebéc, I would feel a moral obligation to write my page in Portuguese, but this is Brazil and they love everything from Europe and the US. It would also be highly unpractical for many reasons: my written Portuguese still leave much to be desired (deixa muito a desejar) and a lot of the spontaneity would be lost. Also, maintaining a trilingual (English-Dutch-Portuguese) web page seems an exageration since those Brazilians interested in the subjects on this page can surely read English.

So my idea is to maintain a web page about the scientific me. For a brief look at the personal me and to understand the reason the irrational decision to move to Brazil please click here.

Favourite Books: as a true intellectual (my wife doesn´t think I should cakk myself one) I can reveal things about myself by telling about my favourite books:

• Dune, by Frank Herbert. Certainly the best SF book I read.
• Brazil, by Errol Lincoln Uys. The history of Brazil in a romanticized but very readable version
• The Brazilians, by Page. A fair description of contemporary Brazil
• The Art of Computer Programming Vol 2, by Knuth. All the stuff about random numbers, primality testing and factoring. Need I say more?
• The Handbook of Cryptography. A beauty, though too tough for most of my CS students. They even cite some of my papers.
• Cryptography and Network Security, by Stallings. Probably the best textbook for CS students, though I don't like the way he does the math. There is virtually no distinction between the 2nd and 3rd edition.
• Cryptographic Protocols, by me, yet to be written. There is no good book about protocols. All the books I've seen so far are either too shallow, or too theoretical. One day I hope to write the book that I believe is missing.
• Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, by Nielsen and Chuang. When I did my thesis it did not exist, now it is the book. They cite some of my work.
• The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. Convinced me that evolution makes more sense than religion as an explanation for why we are here. His other books are worth reading too.
• Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Gives a reasonable explanation why Europe invaded the Americas and not the other way around
• The Prisoners Dilemma, by William Poundstone. The best explanation about Game Theory in daily life, told through a biography of John von Neumann.
• Non-zero sum. Somewhat along the same lines, but worth reading
• Pi in the sky, by John D. Barrow. Changed my way of thinking about mathematics
• Probability Theory, The Logic of Science,by E.T.Jaynes. This book changed completely my thinking about the interpretation of probability theory.
• Secret and Lies Digital Security in a Networked World, by Bruce Schneier. Even though I am not a fan of Applied Cryptography (even though he cites my work) I found this book inspiring
• Database Nation, by Simson Garfinkel. Made me stop using my credit card. For one day.

Favourite programming language: Python. (I worked in the corridor as Guido :-)

Favourite films: Apocalypse Now, North by North-West

• (09/Feb/2004 -- To be continued)