17 ms·
Free Math Books
- opheliate 6y agoWow, these look great! Does anyone know of any similar resources for mechanics, specifically the Hamiltonian & Lagrangian formulations? I've had a bit of trouble finding good resources online to supplement my mechanics modules at uni.
- mhh__ 6y agoBased on "uni" I'm guessing you are at a UK institution (as am I). The notes are utter dogshit because there's no culture of publishing them online for the public. Kibble's classical mechanics book is deep, easy to read and cheap, I'd start there. Most physics books past a certain level end up with an increasingly hand-wavy derivation of the Euler-lagrange equations in some context
- abhinav22 6y agoLook for Dover books, particularly from Russian authors. Cheap and good!
- blewboarwastake 6y agoI found these lecture notes by David Tong to be really good at a glance [1]. A free introductory physics book [2]. I don't have much physics stuff and I know almost nothing about it, I mostly focus on Math/CS, this is some stuff that I had bookmarked. Maybe someone else here can share some good Mechanics resources. [1] http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/dynamics.html http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/dynamics.html [2] http://www.lightandmatter.com http://www.lightandmatter.com
- posix_me_less 6y agoTong is good, most appropriate if you already know a little about the subject. However, it is a "fast-track" kind of resource, it is good to read some standard textbooks on the subject, i.e. Landau & Lifshitz (the most efficient book on theoretical mechanics ever) and Goldstein (broad and interesting).
- mhh__ 6y agoAlthough I have immense respect for them I really don't like L&L all that much. The first one is pretty beautiful but it could use some material on the "deeper" side of things, particularly the connection with geometry and Noether's theorem. As for the others, they're just too "russian" - I like how oddly practical they are, but they're just not structured properly - StatPhys in particular just doesn't flow very well. The typesetting is also a crime against humanity - they should be done similarly to the Feynman lectures, so typed up in LaTeX rather than whatever they are now
- posix_me_less 6y agoRegarding geometry and Noether's theorem, I disagree. That stuff is way overblown in general, it gives you very little ( in classical mechanics) for the time and page count the subject requires. I had a lecture on this topic from enthusiast well-respected physicist, and I kept thinking, this stuff is interesting math but completely useless to a physicist.
- mhh__ 6y agoClassical mechanics is ultimately just masturbation compared to the "real thing", it's all a warm-up for the mind rather than teaching you how to calculate stresses on a beam - Full on symplectic geometry is niche but the basics of Noether's theorem and symmetries are central to classical and quantum field theories which are ultimately the language in which the cutting edge of fundamental physics speaks. So I sort of agree, but take the two Oxford books on QFT and Statistical physics - they pack in enormous amounts of detail in a 3 or 4 hundred pages. There's room to spare if the book is the right shape.
- posix_me_less 6y agoDoes anybody know of an awesome list that has more of these kinds of "pdf textbooks" on math/phys/engineering?
- enriquto 6y ago> Does anybody know of an awesome list that has more of these kinds of "pdf textbooks" on math/phys/engineering? Go to John Baez's awesome list "How to Learn Math and Physics": https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html And then to Library Genesis.
- human4fter4ll 6y agoThank you so much!
- mathnmusic 6y agoI have been adding a number of these free books at https://learnawesome.org/ https://learnawesome.org/ Do you really care about the format being PDF or is it about the books being FREE? I'd like to make common queries like yours easier. LearnAwesome is open-source, so of course you're free to contribute: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn
- mattowen_uk 6y agoOooh this is like a dmoz.org list from yesteryear when the web was useful. Bookmarked, Cheers!
- Spooky23 6y agoNerds love to bike shed crap like this and bite the hand that feeds. To paraphrase a typical rant: “Making knowledge free and accessible is useless unless a libre format is used like Markdown.” Lol The PDF beef is funnier in that people usually don’t know why they are morally opposed to PDF, it usually boils down to not liking Adobe Acrobat a decade ago, not accepting that page format preservation is a thing, or some beef with zooming or something. End of the day, it seeks to be digital paper. End of the day, it’s an open standard with multiple implementations. Just by virtue of the US Federal Courts using it for millions of documents it will be usable for the foreseeable future, well beyond our lifetimes. (And there are many similar or even bigger examples)
- wwwhizz 6y agoUnder which license are these books published?
- chrismorgan 6y agoAt the end of the One Variable Advanced Calculus table of contents is this text: > Copyright © 2018, You are welcome to use this, including copying it for use in classes or referring to it on line but not to publish it for money. I do constantly upgrade it when I find things which could be improved.
- cpp_frog 6y agoIn college I was taught Linear Algebra from the operator point of view, rather than with matrices. That way theorems are clearer and the student's understanding is deeper, but for applications it's better to study from the matrix point of view and with lots of examples. Kuttler's book was refreshing in that sense. His other books are excellent, too. If you have been studying pure math (or french-style applied math which is just pure math with a concentration in Analysis) they are a light and fun complementary read.
- mhh__ 6y agoAlthough I understand that matrix-soup is kind of the entropic endstate of all high school mathematics pedagogy, I think it is a real tragedy: In the UK especially even the best and brightest barely touch any real mathematics until after they leave secondary school so they leave with almost literally no idea of what university mathematics consists of. It's all well and good training people to be engineers, but the universities end up teaching the whole syllabus to them again in about 6 weeks. It's just shit. The only reason why I am now doing theoretical physics (I was in the dumb group initially and worked my way up largely by myself) is because I read a calculus textbook by accident and got hooked when I was 14. Even when I made it to the top of the pile I still wasn't allowed to do anything more than calculus because the module system means we had to choose as a class whether to do group theory or not.
- phonebucket 6y agoAnother solid source of free math resources: https://realnotcomplex.com/ https://realnotcomplex.com/
- amelius 6y agoAre the answers to the exercises to be found somewhere?
- AcademicHamster 6y agoProbably not. That’s why most of these books are useless for people that self-study. There isn’t an external feedback mechanism to check your work. I’d recommend hiring a tutor. You can post online too, but the answers to your questions may vary.
- commandlinefan 6y agoI never understood why they do that - especially for something like this that's offered for free. What's the point of even including the exercises if there's no way to check the answers?
- AcademicHamster 6y agoI wondered the same. I have no idea, other than to speculate. In this case, it might be out of habit (since this is usually how textbooks are written) or laziness. I can’t recommend any of these books for self-studies unless the person studying is fine with posting every exercise they do online for correctness checks or can hire a tutor.
- carapace 6y agoIt's really hard to do (at all, let alone well) but the point is to encode more information in the problems such that, by solving them oneself, the student gains direct understanding of some technique or application or extension that wasn't covered in the main text. In a (well-written) textbook there might be five or tens times as much information latent in the (solving of the) exercises than in the entire preceding chapter. Writing these kinds of sets of exercises is very challenging, much harder than just writing a textbook.
- AlphENsign_Tech 6y ago
- visarga 6y agoOff topic: nice PDF rendering I wish normal PDF would be as fluent.
- lightspot21 6y agoIndeed, LaTeX makes for really awesome results if you can put in the time to learn it (which is not a lot for basic usage). Plus it helps enforce a common style in all docs, and works well with Git.
- xanax 6y agoI like this. The more free information the better.
- tomcam 6y agoWhat an amazing amount of work to give the world for free. Thank you.
- amilein7minutes 6y agoDid the same person write all these books, which altogether amount to upwards of 10k pages? From his website, he is quite an active research mathematician too. While just writing so many textbooks is a huge accomplishment in itself, the author has also made them available for free; I am lost for words at how prolific as well as generous the author is. I really want to know how this was possible, how long it took, and more about their motivation.