The book under review is an expanded translation of a unique phenomenon in the Russian mathematical literature. If nothing else, its staying power may serve an enticement to anyone interested in, or involved with, high school geometry. First published in 1892 by A. P. Kiselev as Elementary Geometry, by 1940 it underwent more than 40 revisions and eventually became a measuring rod for geometry education in Russia against which all other textbooks had to be judged. Its introduction to the English speaking student and teacher is more than welcome. The effort by Professor A. Givental who translated the book from Russian and combined pieces of the many editions of the original deserves a wholehearted recognition and sincere praise.
The early history of the book is murky. In the Tsarist Russia Kiselev's Geometry competed successfully against other textbooks. Its 23nd (1914) is available online. The upheaval of 1917 brought an overhaul of the education system based more on revolutionary zeal than on evolutionary societal demands. But towards the early 1930s the situation was ripe for a more rational attitude. On February 12, 1933, the Central Party Committee has issued a directive that instructed the responsible organizations to replace the "working (class) books" used in schools until then with specially designated "stable" textbooks (Math Education, n1 1934, p. 71). On November 16, 1936, the Mathematical Committee of the People's Commissariat of Education has branded the originally selected geometry book as an illiterate concoction of the lowest quality and recommended its immediate removal. More ...
Jerry Slocum and Dic Sonneveld
The book adds intrigue to the humanistic background of Sam Loyd's puzzle: as the authors have found, Sam Loyd has not invented the puzzle, but managed to fool the contemporaries and following generations into believing otherwise. It took five quarters of a century for the truth to be revealed. By painstakingly wading through thousands of newspapers found in dozens of locations throughout the United States and Europe, the authors uncovered the true origins of the puzzle and its winding itinerary to the market and into the history.
The book itself is of the gift quality, well written and exquisitely illustrated. The text is authenticated with photographs and newspaper clips. Interspersed among bits and pieces related to the puzzle, many illustrations build up the historic background and help recreate and sense the cultural atmosphere of the last two decades of the 19th century. More ...
G. Suri and H. Singh Bal
A mathematical novel!
Is this a new genre? Is there any justification for such a subtitle? Well, this is a novel and a novel with a captivating plot at that. Then it is also a book about mathematics, about its philosophy, its beauty and about its relevance to the human understanding of the surrounding world. There is not a page where mathematics or mathematicians are not mentioned. Mathematics is woven inextricably into the story line itself and I would say that the plot evolves with the mathematical precision.
The story begins with a nostalgic flashback experienced by the main character, Ravi Kapoor, to the time his mathematician grandfather gave him a math problem to try on a calculator. The manner in which the problem was given suggests gentleness in the grandfather's relationship with his grandson and appreciation of the magical effect a solution might have on the boy. The grandfather died the next day, but the reader is left with the realization of the importance the memory of the grandfather played in Ravi's life. It is noteworthy that in the absence of the grandfather's wise guidance the boy grows indifferent to mathematics. More ...
Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman
A result of an unusual collaboration of two authors who never met, this is a glamorous book which will be treasured by all mathematics fans and especially by lovers of geometry.
The period that began in the early seventeenth century and lasted a little past the mid-nineteenth holds fascination for any student of Japanese history. During this period of roughly 200 years the country was almost entirely closed to foreign influence; travel to and from the West was banned and considered a capital offence. Trade with the West was channeled through the man-made miniature island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbor. (However, trade with China and Korea was not so obstructed.) Deshima was surrounded by a wall and joined to the mainland by a guarded bridge. More ...
T. Andreescu and D. Andrica
The book reaches to about the same audience of (I quote from the back cover) "undergraduates, high school students and their teachers, mathematical contestants ... and their coaches, as well as anyone interested in essential mathematics," as some other books on the market, notably L.-s. Hahn's Complex Numbers & Geometry from the MAA, with which it has a nonempty overlap, naturally. ... The book is a real treasure trove of nontrivial elementary key concepts and applications of complex numbers developed in a systematic manner with a focus on problem solving techniques. Much of the book goes to geometric applications, of course, but there are also sections on polynomial equations, trigonometry, combinatorics ... More ...
C. Pritchard
The book is an expanded collection of 57 articles published in Mathematical Gazette and Mathematics in School — two journals of The Mathematical Association, a British organization for teachers of mathematics — over about one hundred years. The Mathematical Association is the name taken by the Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching in 1897. The latter was created in 1871. At the time, school and university geometry curricula were entirely based on Euclid's Elements and geometry was universally "viewed as the ideal vehicle for developing an understanding of formal proof". More ...
The book combines concepts and results from mathematics and computer science related to the generation of sequences by simple computational model called the finite automaton. More ...
The book is intended for teachers of mathematics in professional development and preservice settings. This is one part of a triptych that also includes the Facilitator's Guide and the Further Explorations CD-ROM. In the absence of the latter two pieces, the review relates only to the one book at hand. More ...
This laptop of a handbook is a tremendous collection of 65 articles on discrete and computational geometry. The second edition, at 1539 pages, is more than 500 pages longer than the first. The organization of the book is superb. Each article/chapter begins with an introduction and ends with lists of recommended surveys and related chapters, as well as comprehensive references. In addition, each chapter contains one or more glossaries. More ...
The title of the book, A Course in the Geometry of n Dimensions, is a misnomer on two accounts. First, the book is too small -- 63 pages in all -- for even a 1-semester course. Second, the book is not about geometry per se. A longer title, say, Basic Elements of the Geometry of n-Space and Their Application to the Advanced Theoretical Statistics: An Intuitive Approach, would better relate the contents of the book to a potential reader. But that, of course, would be too long a title for such a small book. More ...
To paraphrase the memorable speech given by Bilbo Baggins on the occasion of his eleventy-first birthday, I liked less than half of the book half as well as it deserves. Let me explain. More ...
... there is nothing in the world of mathematics that corresponds to an audience in a concert hall, where the passive listen to the active. Happily, mathematicians are all doers, not spectators. Doing is much more fun than merely watching or listening, and I celebrate this in the title of the book.
Unfortunately, the celebration does not seem to propagate into the body of the book leaving the title quite detached from the contents and the manner in which the book has been written. More ...
