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I think most maths books from back then are pretty inscrutable (and I'm a mathematician). In particular, printing pictures was expensive, so they wrote complex
by mkl 5y ago
I think most maths books from back then are pretty inscrutable (and I'm a mathematician). In particular, printing pictures was expensive, so they wrote complex descriptions instead, often using terminology that's hardly seen any more. Maths books have in general become much more accessible at school and undergraduate level.
- codeflo 5y agoDepends on the exact branch of mathematics I guess. As a CS major, I found Turing’s paper on decidability very readable, for example. Gödel’s original proof of his incompleteness theorem isn’t too bad either.
- mkl 5y agoWell those are research papers, which have a different purpose, and I suspect in some fields research papers are actually more inscrutable now than then. I'm talking about books intended for an audience like the linked one, high school or early undergraduate. I haven't done an exhaustive survey or anything, but most of the ones I've looked at on calculus, trigonometry, etc. just wouldn't work for most students now; with the improved accessibility, much higher numbers of more diverse students are learning this kind of maths.