What book has had the greatest impact on you?

George Gamow’s “One, Two, Three . . . Infinity” (1947) and Edward Kasner and James Newman’s “Mathematics and the Imagination” (1940) are both still in print. I have aspired to write a book as influential to others as these books have been influential to me. The closest I have come is “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries” (2007), but while I think it succeeds on many educational levels, I’m quite sure it falls short of what these authors accomplished. For me, at middle-school age, they turned math and science into an intellectual playground that I never wanted to leave. It’s where I first learned about the numbers googol and googolplex (a googolplex is so large, you cannot fully write it, for it contains more zeros than the number of particles in the universe). It’s also where I learned about higher dimensions and the general power of mathematics to decode the universe.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

I’d like to believe that the president of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, has time to read more than one book. But picking just one book reveals my bias: “Physics for Future Presidents,” by Richard A. Muller (2009) is, of course, already conceived for this purpose. The president’s science adviser has traditionally been a physicist. Parting the layered curtains of science reveals that there’s no understanding of biology without chemistry, and there is no understanding of chemistry without physics. Informed people in government have known this from the beginning. And all of engineering derives from the laws of physics themselves. So the physics literacy of a president is a good thing, especially since innovations in science and technology will drive the engines of 21st-century economies. Failure to understand or invest wisely here will doom a nation to economic irrelevance.

What books have you most enjoyed sharing with your children?

The last book that I read to both of my kids, at the same time, was Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio” (1883). At the time, they were both old enough to read on their own, but I nonetheless invited them to hear my recitation, in four or five sittings. Only when you read the original book do you realize how much of an undisciplined, stubborn, troublemaking truant Pinocchio actually was — complete with him squashing Jiminy Cricket, reducing him to a mere smudge on the wall, killing his short-lived spiritual adviser early in the story. The book served as an excellent example of how not to behave as a child. And it further served as a reminder of how Hollywood, or Disney in particular, can denude fairy tales of their strongest messages.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

Oscar Wilde. Anyone who could pen the phrase “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” gets a seat at my dinner table. Also, I’ve been intrigued by the breadth of topics that interested Edgar Allan Poe. In particular, his prose poem of speculative science called “Eureka” (1848), which lays out basic tenets of modern cosmology, 70 years before cosmology even existed as a subject of study. For all we know, their best-known works are only the tip of an iceberg of mental processing and thoughts that engaged them daily. These would surely be thoughts that would emerge during a nice meal I might have with them, over a good bottle of wine.

If you could be any character from literature, who would you be?

I’d be Thomas Stockmann, the medical doctor in the 1882 Henrik Ibsen play “An Enemy of the People.” And I’d handle the situation a bit differently. I’d alert the townspeople of the problem with their public baths in such a way that they would welcome the news rather than reject it. This requires sensitivity to how people think, and an awareness of what they value in life and why. The town might then have been compelled to fix the problem rather than view the messenger and his message as their enemy. When I first read the story, I was astonished that educated adults would behave in such a manner, and was prepared to discount the whole story as a work of unrealistic fiction. I would later see actual people — including those in power — behave in just this way on all manner of scientific topics, instilling within me the urge to become the doctor’s character and make everything O.K.

What book have you always meant to read and haven’t gotten around to yet? Anything you feel embarrassed never to have read?

Although I’m not actually embarrassed by this, I tend not to read books that have awesome movies made from them, regardless of how well or badly the movie represented the actual written story. Instead, at cocktail parties, I’ve always found it a bit awkward when I’m not up-to-date on all the latest novels and other written works that get reviewed in The New York Review of Books. That means I’m not only not reading the hottest novels, I’m not even reading the reviews of the novels themselves.

What do you plan to read next?

Four books that I just acquired from an antiquarian bookseller — short monographs by the philosopher, mathematician and social activist Bertrand Russell: “Justice in War-Time” (the 1924 printing), “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays” (1932 edition), “Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare” (1959) and “Has Man a Future?” (1961). It’s always refreshing to see what a deep-thinking, smart and worldly person (who is not a politician) has to say about the social and geopolitical challenges of the day.