
Classic maths books reset with LaTeX on Project Gutenberg - ColinWright
http://aperiodical.com/2012/04/classic-maths-books-reset-with-latex-on-project-gutenberg/
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hsmyers
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.

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hessenwolf
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.

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

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imrehg
If only it had WiFi, not just 3G, I would have bought one as soon as it came
out...

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ivan_ah
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."

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Edootjuh
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> .

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lallysingh
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!

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Edootjuh
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.

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JoachimSchipper
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.

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

[http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Project_Gutenberg_Ne...](http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Project_Gutenberg_Needs_Your_Donation)

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epsil
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>

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

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jason_slack
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?

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JoshTriplett
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...](http://mirror.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/generic/pgf/pgfmanual.pdf))
for fancy diagrams and graphics, pgfplots for graphs and plots, and hyperref
and url for nice cross-references and links.

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jason_slack
That works, thank you.

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richardlblair
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.

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kylemaxwell
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!

~~~
hessenwolf
Name some favourites?

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srconstantin
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.)

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amouat
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.

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srconstantin
Not in that case.

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

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amouat
Thanks!

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btian
Link is down

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christianp
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.

