Eric Weinstein’s Bookshelf: a List of Significant Books – Part 1

A recent Eric Weinstein tweet sparked this mini-project. There’s not much information readily available online regarding Eric’s favorite books or book recommendations. The reason for this may be because he says people are usually disappointed when he does share them. Nevertheless, he recently posted a picture of over 100 books that were significant enough for him to bring home after cleaning out his office. Let’s dive in to Eric Weinstein’s bookshelf!

Folks frequently ask “What are the books that changed your life?” If I tell them, they are usually radically disappointed. I find that curious. I just cleared out of an office, and these are 4 shelves of spines of books that mattered enough to me to bring home. So here they are:

Before we dig into the list, here are a few caveats. I did my best to find the correct books, but there might be a few errors. The links may not take you to the exact book on Eric’s bookshelf. If there was a newer edition or the paperback looked better, I defaulted to the newer/shinier version. If you spot an error, leave a comment below or tweet me and I’d be happy to fix it.

Top Shelf

• Unknown #1

• The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes

• More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics by Philip Mirowski

• Accounting for Tastes by Gary S. Becker

• Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist by George J. Stigler

• Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations by Paul Krugman

• Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach by Jeffrey M. Wooldridge

• A History of Economic Theory: Classic Contributions, 1720-1980 by Jürg Niehans

• Elements of Information Theory by Thomas M. Cover & Joy A. Thomas

• Elements of the Theory of Computation by Harry Lewis & Christos H. Papadimitriou

• Unknown #2

• Unknown #3

• Differential Topology by Victor Guillemin & Alan Pollack

• Unknown #4

• General Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics by Norbert Straumann

• Supermanifolds by Bryce DeWitt

• Introduction to Gauge Field Theories by M. Chaichian & N.F. Nelipa

• Pattern Classification by Richard O. Duda, Peter E. Hart, David G. Stork

• The Ideas of Particle Physics by Guy D. Coughlan & James E. Dodd

• Basic Algebra I by Nathan Jacobson

• Hindi*

• Hindustani for the Tourist: A Phonetic Phrase Book for Everyday Use by N. J Hamilton

• Hindi & Urdu*

• Hindi*

• Colloquial Turkish: The Complete Course for Beginners by Jeroen Aarssen

• Everyday Indonesian by Thomas G. Oey

• Turkish Grammar by Yusuf Buz

• Guide to LaTeX by Helmut Kopka & Patrick W. Daly

• Teach Yourself Hindi by Rupert Snell & Simon Weightman

• Spoken and Written Hindi by Bal Govind Misra & G.H. Fairbanks

• The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages by Frederick Bodmer & Lancelot Thomas Hogben

• The New Penguin Russian Course by Nicholas J. Brown

• Turkish Phrase Book*

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So there it is! The top shelf of Eric Weinstein’s bookshelf (the one he shared, I’m sure he has more) had 33 books and I was able to identify 29 of them. Also, there are 4 titles where I could see the title, but not determine the exact book. Let me know if you can figure out the missing ones. If you’re looking at the picture in the original orientation, my list goes from right to left.

As you probably already noticed, I included Amazon links for some of the books. These are affiliate links and I earn money if you purchase the books via these links. They are also an easy way to include images. This took a while to compile and I’d appreciate you using the links in exchange for the time I spent putting this list together.

Shop Amazon With My Affiliate Link

For the books without direct Amazon links, just copy/paste the full title and you shouldn’t have a problem finding the book. I’ll be doing separate posts for each shelf. Thanks to Eric for sharing!