My Facebook friend, the computer scientists Thore Husfeldt, recently remarked in a post that he has read more books by Steven Pinker than any other non-fiction authors. In my natural egotism, that led me to wonder which author had written the most non-fiction books that I have read.
The answer was obvious: my father Philip J. Davis. I have read 14 non-fiction books that he authored or co-authored; 12 published during his lifetime as "actual books" and two published posthumously on the Web. (He also wrote four non-fiction books, of mathematical research, that I haven't read.)
However, that's obviously something of a special case. Other than my father, which author wrote the most non-fiction books that I have read? Which other authors have written a lot of non-fiction books that I've read?
Here's the list, as best as I can think it through, in descending order of number of books, down to four books. I've probably missed a couple of authors, but I doubt that I've missed many. Multi-volume collections are obviously problematic; in general I've counted each volume as one, but I probably haven't been consistent about that. I'm not counting edited collections of books by many different authors.
Philip J. Davis: The Lore of Large Numbers, Interpolation and Approximation, The Mathematics of Matrices, 3.1416 and all that (with William G. Chinn), The Thread, The Mathematical Experience (with Reuben Hersh), Descartes' Dream (with Reuben Hersh), Mathematical Experiences of the Second Kind, The Education of a Mathematician, Mathematics and Common Sense, Ancient Loons: Tales David Pingree Told me, Unity and Disunity and Other Mathematical Essays, When I was a Boy, Seeing the Mountain West: A Lopsided View.
Carl Sandburg: 6 volume biography of Abraham Lincoln
Eugene Charniak: Toward a Model of Children’s Story Comprehension (PhD thesis), Artificial Intelligence Programming (with Chris Riesbeck and Drew McDermott), Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (with Drew McDermott), Statistical Language Learning, AI & I: An Intellectual History of Artificial Intelligence.
Gary Marcus: The Algebraic Mind, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning, Rebooting AI (with me), Taming Silicon Valley.
Maurice Samuel: The World of Sholom Aleichem, Prince of the Ghetto, Certain People of the Book, Little Did I Know, In the Beginning, Love: Dialogues on the Bible (with Mark van Doren).
Genevieve Foster: George Washington's World, Abraham Lincoln's World, Augustus Caesar's World, The World of Columbus and Sons.
Edward Gibbon: Vols. 1-3 (of 6) of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Autobiography.
Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, The Stuff of Thought, The Sense of Style
Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi.