Core reading recommendations

The books here are intellectually engaging and enriching, but do not require you to work through a lot of details while reading them, so you can read them without paper and pencil.

Unless otherwise stated, books are generally accessible to reasonably academically talented high school students with an interest in the relevant subjects, and also to highly precocious middle school students. However, we would recommend reading a few sample chapters of the books (generally available for free download) to see if the difficulty level is suitable before you buy the book.

Mathematics

Book	Author	ISBN and purchase links	Why we're recommending it
Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction	Timothy Gowers	ISBN 978-0192853615, Amazon purchase	??
The Mathematical Experience	Philip J. Davis, Reuben Hersh	ISBN 978-0395929681, Amazon purchase	The book provides excellent insight into the kind of work that mathematicians do, without requiring the readers to grasp a lot of mathematics.

Statistics and applications to data analysis

Book	Author	ISBN and purchase links	Why we're recommending it
The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century	David Salsburg	ISBN 978-0805071344	Provides a historical overview of the important developments in statistics and the statistical way of thinking.
Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data	Charles Wheelan	ISBN 978-0393347777 (paperback), Amazon link	Explores statistics concepts through a number of simple real-world examples.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't	Nate Silver	ISBN 978-0141975658 (paperback), Amazon paperback, Amazon Kindle	Explores ideas from statistics and data analysis with the specific goal of understanding the art and science of predicting the future.

Economics

Book	Author	ISBN and purchase links	Why we're recommending it
Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science	Charles Wheelan	ISBN 978-0393337648, Amazon paperback, Amazon Kindle	??
The Undercover Economist	Timothy Harford	ISBN 978-0345494016, Amazon paperback	This book uses real-world examples and a minimum of mathematical formalism to explain key economic concepts. Moreover, it systematically covers a significant fraction of the typical introductory college economics course, unlike some of the other pop economics literature.
The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life	Steven Landsburg	ISBN 978-1451651737, Amazon paperback	The original book was one of the first in the "pop economics" literature. It offers an excellent introduction to the economic way of thinking using real-world examples and purely verbal reasoning (with a minimum of mathematics). A revised edition in 2012 updated some of the numbers so that they make more sense to modern readers.

While Freakonomics and its sequel Superfreakonomics are much better known than the above books, we would not recommend Freakonomics or Superfreakonomics if your goal is to obtain an understanding of the economic way of thinking, because they do not systematically cover the core economic concepts.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
• The New Personality Self-Portrait: Why You Think, Work, Love and Act the Way You Do by John Oldham and Lois Morris
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker.
• The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
• The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty by Peter Singer

• Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif
• Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat