Popular Press

The Eudaemonic Pie - Thomas Bass (The Newtonian Casino in the UK) (1985) 

A high-tech adventure about breaking the bank in Las Vegas with toe-operated computers. The result is a veritable piñata of a book, which, when smashed by the readers enthusiastic attention, showers upon him everything from the history of useless roulette systems to the latest developments in chaos theory, said The New York Times. Richard Dawkins called it an astonishing and fascinating tale of scientific heroism. The Los Angeles Times said that Bass has done the best job so far of capturing the marriage of technical imagination and the communal coziness that gave birth to Silicon Valley. - Amazon

Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick (1987)

Chaos records the birth of a new science. This new science offers a way of seeing order and pattern where formerly only the random, the erratic, the unpredictable—in short, the chaotic—had been observed. In the words of Douglas Hofstadter, “It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order—and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”

Although highly mathematical in origin, chaos is a science of the everyday world, addressing questions every child has wondered about: how clouds form, how smoke rises, how water eddies in a stream.

Chaos is a history of discovery. It chronicles, in the words of the scientists themselves, their conflicts and frustrations, their emotions and moments of revelation. After reading Chaos, you will never look at the world in quite the same way again. - goodreads

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos - Mitch Waldrup (1992)

Why did the stock market crash more than 500 points on a single Monday in 1987? Why do ancient species often remain stable in the fossil record for millions of years and then suddenly disappear? In a world where nice guys often finish last, why do humans value trust and cooperation? At first glance these questions don't appear to have anything in common, but in fact every one of these statements refers to a complex system. The science of complexity studies how single elements, such as a species or a stock, spontaneously organize into complicated structures like ecosystems and economies; stars become galaxies, and snowflakes avalanches almost as if these systems were obeying a hidden yearning for order. 
Drawing from diverse fields, scientific luminaries such as Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann and Kenneth Arrow are studying complexity at a think tank called The Santa Fe Institute. The revolutionary new discoveries researchers have made there could change the face of every science from biology to cosmology to economics. M. Mitchell Waldrop's groundbreaking bestseller takes readers into the hearts and minds of these scientists to tell the story behind this scientific revolution as it unfolds. - g

The Predictors:  How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street - Thomas Bass (2001)

Excerpted in The New Yorker and hailed by the business press, The Predictors is destined to become a classic of its generation--an antic, subversive odyssey into a universe defined by the mystical convergence of physics and finance.

How could a couple of rumpled physicists in sandals and Eat-the-Rich T-shirts, piling computers into an adobe house in Santa Fe, hope to take on the masters of the universe from Morgan Stanley? Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard may never have read The Wall Street Journal, but they happen to be among the founders of the new sciences of chaos and complexity. Who better to try to find order in the apparently unreasoned chaos of the global financial markets? Thomas A. Bass takes us inside their start-up company, following it from its inception as a motley collection of longhaired Ph.D.s to its passage into the centers of financial power, where "the predictors" find investors and finally go live with real money. The Predictors is a dizzying, often hilarious tale of genius and greed. - goodreads

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling - Adam Kucharski (2015)

Gamblers have been trying to figure out how to game the system since our ancestors first made wagers over dice fashioned from knucklebones: in revolutionary Paris, the 'martingale' strategy was rumoured to lead to foolproof success at the roulette table; now, in the 21st century, professional gamblers are using cutting-edge techniques to tilt the odds further in their favour. At the roulette wheel, card table or racecourse, science is giving us the competitive edge over opponents, casinos and bookmakers. But is there such a thing as a perfect bet? The Perfect Bet looks beyond probability and statistics to examine how wagers have inspired a plethora of new disciplines - spanning chaos theory, behavioural psychology, machine learning and game theory - which are not just revolutionising gambling, but changing our fundamental notions about chance, randomness and luck. Explaining why poker is gaming's last bastion of human superiority over artificial intelligence, how methods originally developed for the US nuclear programme are helping pundits predict sports results and how a new breed of algorithms are managing to lose banks and asset traders millions, The Perfect Bet has the inside track on just about any wager you'd care to place. - Amazon