Classic maths books reset with LaTeX on Project Gutenberg

http://aperiodical.com/2012/04/classic-maths-books-reset-with-latex-on-project-gutenberg/

by ColinWright • 14 years ago

227 28 14 years ago

hsmyers• 14 years ago

The other day while reading about the growing discontent with the price of subscriptions and remembering the similar problem with the price of student text the only thing I could think about was that few of today's texts are better than the classic mathematical texts. I've a small shelf of books published by Chelsea with names on them like Hilbert, Abel, Gauss and others who pretty much established the base line of modern mathematics. That Project Gutenberg is on course to provide the same books and more is some of the best news I've heard as a solution to the problem. The only down side I can think of is that these books have a fairly steep learning curve since they depend on a much better previous education than we do today. That however is a fixable problem as well. This is good news indeed! Here is the link: http://www.ams.org/bookstore/chelsealist

EDIT: added URL and expanded name list.

kibwen• 14 years ago

Whoa, that link looks like a pretty incredible resource. Thanks for sharing!

hessenwolf2• 14 years ago

I'm like a cat in heat looking through the titles - but I am already too busy!! Grrrg.

Question: What is a good electronic device for reading ~A4/Letter sized format? Cheap and cheerful. No 'brain' required other than to search and switch between documents.

dudurocha• 14 years ago

Only one I can think of, is the Kindle DX. http://amzn.to/Io1KxB

btian• 14 years ago

Link is down

christianp• 14 years ago

Hello! I'm one of the site's admins. I forgot to turn on caching :(

Anyway, what the post was linking to was this page on Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Mathematics_%28Bookshelf%29

Many of the textbooks there have been rewritten in LaTeX and now look just as good as the originals.

Edootjuh2• 14 years ago

The server crashed due to HN coverage: https://twitter.com/#!/aperiodical/status/195557677680689152

"the server has crashed after having HackerNews pointed at it. Trying to get it rebooted now, and then we'll enable caching! #toosuccessful"

Also, no search engines seem to have cached it.

EDIT: Blog linked to http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Mathematics_%28Bookshelf%29 .

kylemaxwell• 14 years ago

I'm just incredibly happy with the books they already have on the history of mathematics. When I got my BS in math, the history bits always fascinated me but I never took the time to dig into them with the fervor I'd have liked. Thanks for this!

hessenwolf2• 14 years ago

Name some favourites?

Edootjuh2• 14 years ago

I noticed this book: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13693/13693-pdf.pdf, perhaps others, are missing a table of contents but compiling the tex source does give me one; it has probably only been compiled in one pass.

JoachimSchipper• 14 years ago

Some of this stuff is pretty hard. Allow me to recommend something that HN readers should be able to enjoy: Flatland (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/201) is a highly readable introduction to higher-dimensional spaces.

epsil• 14 years ago

MetaLibri is another free site which uses TeX to typeset classical texts, among them The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.

http://metalibri.wikidot.com/titles

lallysingh• 14 years ago

This is very exciting. First, Gutenberg gets some basic typography. Second, it's one hell of a showcase for LaTeX. Third, I nearly cried when I saw GH Hardy's book in its new LaTeX form. The diagrams alone.

Oh, and there's LaTeX source for each one! Glorious!

ivan_ah• 14 years ago

Wow. Nice. LaTeX typesetting for math just can't be beat.

How can one get involved? Re-typesetting a math book sounds like a good way to learn something...

> The only down side ... steep learning curve since depend previous education > That however is a fixable problem as well.

@hsmyers I think I have the fix. I am writing a book on basic math. I have had good progress coming up with a //modern// introduction to high school math, calculus and linear algebra, but I was worried whether I will be able to teach the more advanced stuff -- now I can let Gauss take care of that ;)

A very funny / concise calculus book: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283 quote from the intro: "Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics—and they are mostly clever fools—seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way."

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

I like the fact that PDF margins are (intentionally, or not) eReaders-optimized. PDFs with wide margins are annoying on Kindle, which does not remove unnecessary whitespace from them, thus forcing user to read pages 'on side' or zoom parts of the document.

unhappyhippie• 14 years ago

The latest Kindle DX crops margins automatically from PDF files. It works well on LaTeX generated files, though not always on scanned ones.

drothlis• 14 years ago

Intentionally, I think:

    This PDF file is optimized for screen viewing, but may 
    easily be recompiled for printing. Please see the
    preamble of the LATEX source file for instructions.

Shows a great attention to detail!

richardlblair• 14 years ago

I love resources like this. Publicly available knowledge, especially on a topic like Math is absolutely priceless. I commend whoever took the time to put this together.

srconstantin2• 14 years ago

Often the different notation from older books makes them harder to learn from, but sometimes I've found them useful. (Watson's "A Treatise on the Theory of Bessel Functions" was the only place I could find certain formulas derived.)

amouat2• 14 years ago

I just had a flick through the book - the notation looked familiar and I'm pretty bad at math. Is there really that much that has changed since 1921?

I ask mainly because I was thinking of using a book like this to brush up.

srconstantin2• 14 years ago

Not in that case.

I think it's really algebra that looks very different after the 50's.

dbaupp• 14 years ago

Some of the books seem to have had (some of) their notation modernised, e.g. in Hardy's A Course in Pure Mathematics, epsilon & delta are the "right" way around in the definition of limits.

jason_slack2• 14 years ago

I now a decent amount of TeX but want to learn more, anyone have a nice advanced example TeX file for laying out large books, docs?

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

The Not So Short Guide to LaTeX (http://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf) provides 95% of what you'll need to lay out a large, non-trivial document. The last 5% you'll get from the documentation of whatever package you need to dig up for some specific functionality you want; for instance, TikZ (http://mirror.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/generic/pgf/pgf...) for fancy diagrams and graphics, pgfplots for graphs and plots, and hyperref and url for nice cross-references and links.

jason_slack2• 14 years ago

That works, thank you.

bulibuta• 14 years ago

Please don't forget to donate a few bucks to this amazing project!

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Project_Gutenberg_Ne...

Classic maths books reset with LaTeX on Project Gutenberg

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