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However, I don't see the entire book as a single pdf?
a single PDF will be provided once one more chapter is compleated.
The same goes for Vipassana meditation.
The people who do this review will have to know enough to follow along.
People do plenty of recreational things which don't make sense from an efficiency perspective; they do it because it's fun.
I plan to upload the entire book as a single PDF when I finish the next chapter (on the cycloid). That will probably be early next week.
I used the original book by Arthur Engel for many years. He was an inspirational teacher.
The MAA tried very hard to publish the book, but I kept adding new material, and a text consisting of math 'selections' rather than a single theme is a hard sell in today's publishing environment.
See https://rubberduckmaths.com/eulers_theorem for an example where i wrote a blog post with lots of inline runnable Python code samples.
I think this is the best format for python code samples and tutorials. It’s even better than notebooks. No IDE to setup, a completely static and saveable html page, easily runnable and changeable python.
That is what makes it so interesting to a "mathematically inclined" layman; a smorgasbord of Mathematics! More value for the money ;-)
If MAA does not understand that there is huge market for Mathematics targeted towards Computer Programmers, they are just dumb. Programmers are the ones with the money and the interest in learning Mathematics presented in a manner more to their understanding.
Please do find some other low-cost publisher to publish this; "Dover Publications" might be a good one since they publish a lot of classics particularly if you position this as a modern update to the Engel book.
For example; John Stillwell positioned his Elements of Mathematics: From Euclid to Gödel as a sort of modern update to Felix Klein's Elementary Mathematics from an Advanced Standpoint. From the preface;
This book grew from an article I wrote in 2008 for the centenary of Felix Klein’s Elementary Mathematics from an Advanced Standpoint. The article reflected on Klein’s view of elementary mathematics, which I found to be surprisingly modern, and made some comments on how his view might change in the light of today’s mathematics. With further reflection I realized that a discussion of elementary mathematics today should include not only some topics that are elementary from the twenty-first-century viewpoint, but also a more precise explanation of the term “elementary” than was possible in Klein’s day.
So, the first goal of the book is to give a bird’s eye view of elementary mathematics and its treasures. This view will sometimes be “from an advanced standpoint,” but nevertheless as elementary as possible. Readers with a good high school training in mathematics should be able to understand most of the book, though no doubt everyone will experience some difficulties, due to the wide range of topics...
The second goal of the book is to explain what “elementary” means, or at least to explain why certain pieces of mathematics seem to be “more elementary” than others. It might be thought that the concept of “elementary” changes continually as mathematics advances. Indeed, some topics now considered part of elementary mathematics are there because some great advance made them elementary...
Presumably a large math textbook publisher that has been publishing math books for literally one hundred years is very tapped into what books likely will and won't sell. I find it unlikely that a layperson where it concerns math book publishing would have some unique insight that MAA does not have. Even if there is a substantial enough market, there are likely unique considerations that MAA is beholden to which we aren't privy to
I don't know what the calculus is like to get an extended version of an existing book published by another publisher, but Dover's Aurora series consists of modern original texts as opposed to their usual republications of classic out of print texts -- this is how Emily Riehl had her "Category Theory in Context" published
Lots of LitRPG series I listen to and spend lots on Audible started on Patreon and released as serials.
Pretty cool what sort of things that Patreon/Youtube/etc enable people to make a living doing nowadays.
For example the Stillwell book i mentioned above has chapters on Arithmetic, Computation, Algebra, Geometry, Calculus, Combinatorics, Probability and Logic thus making it an excellent book to peruse.
- Seems great. Added to the backlog :)
- No colors in PDF illustrations. Is it a deliberate choice?
- > The first six chapters (and Appendix A) are essentially that book, but with the programming language changed to Python, some rewording, reformatting in Latex, and a few additions.
Try [typst](https://typst.app/) as an alternative to Latex.I will read it when it's available
Leaving a comment here so I can come back to this
<3
One approach I've found effective: start with a conjecture, visualize it with matplotlib, then prove it formally. The instant feedback loop helps develop both computational thinking and mathematical rigor. Tools like Jupyter notebooks make this workflow seamless.
For anyone interested in similar resources, "Mathematics for Machine Learning" by Deisenroth et al. and 3Blue1Brown's linear algebra series complement this beautifully by bridging theory and computation.
I just recently went to the exploratorium in SF and saw an exhibit there suggesting that the catenary made a good arch, so browsed that chapter and saw a bit of explanation here which helped. Was also interested to see that Jefferson played some part in the history here.
A nice course for this is of course TAOCP volume 2 old testament or MITs math github https://github.com/mitmath/18335/tree/spring22 (change the yr to suit) like we can't even have nice things like gradient descent anymore because it zigzags and converges to a narrow valley in a minimum
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