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Free and Open-Source Mathematics Textbooks
- ipnon 7y agoThese are books about mathematics that are free and open-source.
- shocks 7y agoNot sure why you’ve been downvoted. The title is ambiguous, it could mean open source textbooks that are free of Mathematics!
- wizzwizz4 7y agoIt could only mean that if it were hyphenated. Given that "Open-Source" is hyphenated, one can assume that hyphens have been made explicit, not left implied, and hence this title does not contain that ambiguity.
- ipnon 7y agoThe title of the submission was changed after my initial comment. The original title was "Mathematics Free Open Source Textbooks", which I interpreted as "textbooks without mathematics that are open source." My initial comment was intended to clarify the content on the submission for people reading the comments.
- vo2maxer 7y agoI don’t believe that the most instructive action to take on the list is to quibble about the title. Also, we humans still excel at context and language processing in general ;-)
- westurner 7y agoThis is a good list of books. Unfortunately many of the links are broken? Probably just my luck, but the first few "with Sage" books I excitedly selected unfortunately 404'd. I'll send an email. > Moreover, the American Institute of Mathematics maintains a list of approved open-source textbooks. https://aimath.org/textbooks/approved-textbooks/ https://aimath.org/textbooks/approved-textbooks/ I also like the (free) Green Tea Press books: Think Stats, Think Bayes, Think DSP, Think Complexity, Modeling and Simulation in Python, Think Python 2e: How To Think Like a Computer Scientist https://greenteapress.com/wp/ https://greenteapress.com/wp/ And IDK how many times I've recommended the book for the OCW "Mathematics for Computer Science" course: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-042j-mathematics-for-computer-science-spring-2015/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... There may be a newer edition than the 2017 version of the book: https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring17/mcs.pdf https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring17/mcs.pdf
- integricho 7y agoI've found MIT's "Mathematics for Computer Science" actually hard to read, and in my opinion it cannot really be called a proper book, more like a collection of notes, as it skips over many details, jumping to conclusions, definitions, results, without giving you an intuitive explanation. In that regards it's actually hard to follow.
- generationP 7y agoIt's fast-going. You may want to start with something more introductory, like: Levin http://discrete.openmathbooks.org/dmoi3.html http://discrete.openmathbooks.org/dmoi3.html Hammack https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/ https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/ the early parts of Newstead https://infinitedescent.xyz/ https://infinitedescent.xyz/
- throwaway17_17 7y agoDoes anyone have a good strategy for archiving and downloading the textbooks from aimath.org? They are all excellently formatted in HTML, but I am not certain what the best way to get the complete book would be.
- BlackLotus89 7y agoWhen I have books in form of webpages I normally write a small crawler in python, extract the text div with beautifulsoup, add <hn> tags for chapter names and throw them all together in html form. Add a cover image and combine everything with pandoc. Nothing fancy but works reliable in an automated fashion
- gmfawcett 7y agoYou might also enjoy /r/mathbooks (and /r/csbooks) on Reddit, where people post links to freely-published math and CS textbooks. Most are not open-source, but all are shared with permission from their authors and publishers. https://www.reddit.com/r/mathbooks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mathbooks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/csbooks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/csbooks/
- creative-coder 7y agoThanks for pointing out these Reddit pages. I wasn't aware of these
- ardavast 7y agoYou can also add "An infinitely large napkin", and "Linear algebra done wrong".
- oefrha 7y ago1. For math textbooks, being “open source” doesn’t really add much value (compared to just free). 2. Don’t limit yourself to free textbooks. I would urge people to not hesitate to pirate PDFs of good, non-free textbooks if you can’t afford them or find them too much of a financial burden (textbooks are usually outrageously priced in the U.S.) A good textbook vs a mediocre one probably doesn’t matter for entry-level topics (think freshman, sophomore, or even junior level topics for math majors), but for advanced topics, good textbooks can be markedly more insightful than a mediocre one, or sometimes you need to approach the same topic with different mindsets by learning from multiple texts.
- jimhefferon 7y ago> For math textbooks, being “open source” doesn’t really add much value (compared to just free) That is wrong. For one thing it allows someone to take up a project if the original author dies. > I would urge people to not hesitate to pirate PDFs of good, non-free textbooks if you can’t afford them or find them too much of a financial burden That is also wrong. Authors spend a significant part of their lives on a book and are entitled to do with it as they like. The best way to get free access to a for-cost text is to use your library. (BTW, I write books that are freely distributed.)
- buzzkillington 7y agoThe price of textbooks is also wrong. If people could make a living from writing textbooks in 1970 that would be the equivalent of $30 today I don't see what's changed that they need to charge $300 for them.
- cesarosum 7y agoGreat idea to compile this list. One of my favourite mathematics books that is available for free download is GeneratingFunctionology - https://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/DownldGF.html https://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/DownldGF.html Well-written and incredibly rewarding.
- jimhefferon 7y agoLots of nice links there, thanks. There needs to be a CMBAN, a Comprehensive Math Book Archive Network. It would fight link rot, allow an author to upload versions as they change and give a blurb as well as version notes, and allow a downloader to know if the book is free or Free, etc. There are some sites that archive some sets but I know of no site that tries to be comprehensive.
- haolez 7y agoMaybe AcademicTorrents might be used. Is it still a thing?
- mpiedrav 7y agoPerhaps a combination of LaTeX/PreTeXt and Open Monograph Press [1] will do :D The idea is to allow authors using LaTeX/PreTeXt to pipeline the document+sources to a repository (think GitHub Pages for math textbooks), as well as preserving existing free content whose sources are lost (e.g., old out-of-print books). [1] https://pkp.sfu.ca/omp https://pkp.sfu.ca/omp
- EncryptEntropy 7y agoSeems they should be up on project Gutenberg as well as a category on archive.org.
- Koshkin 7y agoe-Books, to be exact. Some of us strongly prefer to work with paper books. Borrowing those for free from a library is not always an option, so one ends up buying them at whatever price point and the physical state they are available in. Other considerations: it is still often true that you get what you pay for; also, you spend so much time and effort seriously working through a math book that whatever money you paid for it looks like something that does not matter at all.
- psv1 7y ago> it is still often true that you get what you pay for Hasn't been my experience at all - in fact I haven't noticed a relationship between quality and price of textbooks in either direction. > you spend so much time and effort seriously working through a math book that whatever money you paid for it looks like something that does not matter at all. You'll spend the time if the book is good. That's an advantage of free books - you can discard the bad ones without wasting money.
- oefrha 7y ago> Hasn't been my experience at all - in fact I haven't noticed a relationship between quality and price of textbooks in either direction. Maybe gp was referring to cheaper “international editions” available for certain popular texts. I heard they intentionally add errors to the cheaper editions (or at least shuffle exercises to make students’ lives miserable if their instructors assign textbook problems).
- commandlinefan 7y agoSee if you have a half-price books in your area. You can pick up older second-hand editions of textbooks (like Stewarts Calculus) for like $10.
- dredmorbius 7y agoIt's possible to print many eBook formats (or convert them to something printable), though that comes with a price, especially for one-off / single-copy printing. And eBook is ... well, free. A single copy might run you $40, as here: https://www.bookbaby.com/single-book-printing https://www.bookbaby.com/single-book-printing Used/resale markets for existing texts are of course an option. And many photocopy shops can throw a usable binding on a text, though photocopy costa alone will be comparable to the price cited above, at $0.07 - $0.08 per page generally. In many cases, ebooks become a very reasonable compromise.
- Jahak 7y agoThank you very much
- zcdziura 7y agoWow, it's a fun surprise to see Dana Ernst featured on Hacker News! Before he moved to Arizona, he was a mathematics professor at Plymouth State University. I had him as a Discrete Mathematics teacher, and he was awesome!
- abeppu 7y agoEveryone likes free stuff, and there's nothing wrong with this kind of list per se, but I do think there's a trap here lurking for some people. That is, it's easy to find a free resource appealing. You can grab dozens of free texts of material you'd like to understand! _But_ because old texts are pretty cheaply available (because publishers love making new editions with trivial changes like tweaked exercises, and because math doesn't really go stale), almost always the cost of acquiring a non-free book can is waaay less than the time you'd spend to read it, do problems, and really understand the material. Caring too much about "free" is letting the tail wag the dog.
- VovaPutin 7y ago> math doesn't really go stale I apologize for taking this out of context, but I'd thought I'd comment. Even though math in textbooks doesn't change, presentation totally does. For example, "Measure, Integration & Real Analysis" by Axler [0] is a beauty to behold. Honestly, no books from as recent as aughts match the pics, the font, the color of this book...even the explanations and examples leave many (if not most) real analysis textbooks of the past and present in the dust. [0] The Book Page: http://measure.axler.net/ http://measure.axler.net/ Direct Link: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-33143-6.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-33... It's free.
- throwawaymath 7y agoI have to imagine you know this if you're reading a book like that; but for anyone else reading this comment: I recommend you don't read Measure, Integration and Real Analysis for a first introduction to real analysis. It's "fun" to see Axler present measure theory first and foremost, but analysis is typically a prerequisite to that. The more pedagogically appropriate way to learn analysis is with heavy emphasis on basic topology (metrics) and with the language of geometry. Geometry is useful in calculus and analysis for intuition. Measure is beautiful and helpfully simplifies/generalized a lot of results, but it's really abstract and (in my opinion) unmotivated if you've never encountered rigorous integration or differentiation before. I'd recommend Tao's, Pugh's or Stein & Shakarchi's analysis books over this one if the focus is analysis. I agree with your broader point that the structure and presentation of math can substantively change, even if the fundamental content doesn't at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
- ericmaki 7y agoYou might want to check out Open Math Notes, which is hosted by the AMS and contains almost 100 notes in various subjects, at levels ranging from undergraduate survey course notes to advanced research: https://www.ams.org/open-math-notes https://www.ams.org/open-math-notes
- amitkumar91 7y agoGood list of books. I could be helpful to majority of persons at larg.e