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Higher Math for Beginners (1987)
- amai 5y agoIf you want to spend some money instead on a modern book: Riley, Hobson, Bence: Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering: A Comprehensive Guide It has a whopping 1300 pages, but it has everything you need. And if that is not enough for you get Cahill: Physical Mathematics This will give you advanced topics like differential forms, path integrals, renormalization group, chaos and string theory.
- ivansavz 5y agoSlightly better version here https://archive.org/details/ZeldovichYaglomHigherMathematics https://archive.org/details/ZeldovichYaglomHigherMathematics (the PDF is 20MB instead of 150MB and the text has been OCR-ed)
- dang 5y agoWe've changed to that from https://archive.org/details/HigherMathForBeginners https://archive.org/details/HigherMathForBeginners. Thanks!
- actually_a_dog 5y agoPDF download link for those who want to download it, but don't want to hunt for the link: https://ia801303.us.archive.org/29/items/ZeldovichYaglomHigherMathematics/Zeldovich,%20Yaglom%20Higher%20Math%20for%20Beginners.pdf https://ia801303.us.archive.org/29/items/ZeldovichYaglomHigh...
- GaryTang 5y agoThanks, won’t be long before the woke mob starts censoring this
- shimonabi 5y agoAre pages 358, 373, 379, 396, 530 misprinted or scanned sloppily?
- yuuu 5y agoThis sounds entitled.
- Taywee 5y agoSounds like a pretty straightforward question to me. There's no reason to be defensive about flaws in a math book scan, even if it's largely a cool thing.
- yuuu 5y agoHe edited his comment. Substantially. The original comment told people that because five pages were missing, "either do it right or don't do it at all." That was basically all he said. Great guy, getting me flagged by completely changing his response without acknowledging there was an edit.
- PostOnce 5y agoWow, sorry to hear that. Obviously, when it comes to technical information, something is better than nothing. It's good to know if something's missing so you can go find it, but of course anyone would rather have half a nonfiction book than no book at all, because that still has value.
- PostOnce 5y agoin addition and much more importantly: if no one points out flaws, flaws can not and will not be fixed.
- codetrotter 5y agoThe book in the updated link [1] does not have the problem that the old link had I think, if you were talking about how for example on page 358 the page had become split so that the rightmost part of the page had been cut off and placed on the left side of the page. I didn’t check the other pages because I’m on mobile, but since page 358 looks good in the new link the others might too. [1]: https://archive.org/details/ZeldovichYaglomHigherMathematics https://archive.org/details/ZeldovichYaglomHigherMathematics
- BossingAround 5y agoThe crucial question is, is the text any good? My bias tells me it's next to impossible (but not actually impossible) for a text from 1987 to be 2021-beginner friendly, especially in a field like mathematics.
- keewee7 5y agoActually my view is the opposite. Older math books has a lot of practical examples. It seems like in the 90s and 2000s a lot of math books started being written by pure mathematicians who don't care about the applications of mathematics.
- Jensson 5y agoMy understanding is that in the 90s and 2000s publishers started realizing that they could sell bare bones textbooks and then sell those problem examples in compendiums, effectively double dipping on each student. Edit: For example, books like this: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Gregory-Grant/dp/B08FP7SNZJ https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Gregory-Grant/dp/B08FP7SNZJ > In addition to well-explained solutions, this manual includes corrections and clarifications to the classic textbook Linear Algebra, second edition, by Kenneth Hoffman and Ray Kunze.
- BossingAround 5y agoI think this is actually fair; even Strang, after all, provides answers to only select problem sets (e.g. only odd problem sets in Linear Algebra if I recall correctly) though to be fair to Strang, it seems to me that in his case, it's more a matter of "if you are unsure, come and ask me" and probably not the case of maximizing profits.
- alisonkisk 5y agoThat solution book was written decades after the main textbook, by different authors. Barebones texts books were common in math since Rudin in 1953 and probably earlier.
- rmm 5y ago
- TuLithu 5y agoAwesome book. Thanks. I've been needing to get back on my mathematics studies. This fits the bill perfectly.
- bobuk 5y agoThis very book (but in russian) is the source of all my math skills. Academic Zeldovich was a brilliant physicist and I am glad to know what his works translated to English
- inglor_cz 5y agoThis is a good book. It would be even better if it were typeset in LaTeX. I wonder if such an effort could be financed from some kind of microgrants. Take old Soviet maths and physics books - they were very good! - translate them into English, possibly with small alterations (e.g. a QR code link to an animation), type them in LaTeX or AMSTeX and release them under a friendly license.
- enriquto 5y agoDo you think so? It looks really beautifully typeset to me.
- inglor_cz 5y agoMaybe it is just my problem, but I have hard time studying from a two-column book. I am mostly used to multiple columns in newspapers.
- Bayart 5y agoWouldn't there be right-holders still around ?
- inglor_cz 5y agoIf it was a Western book, definitely, but with books published in the 1980s in the USSR, I am not sure how it works. The USSR was not a signatory to the Berne convention, so the original rights may be lapsed. Russia joined the Berne convention in the 1990s, but there were some reservations agreed upon that limited the retroactivity. I think only Russian IP lawyers can answer that question with any precision.
- VitalyAnkh 5y agoIt’s not *Higher* math. It’s just normal math.
- Throwaway1311 5y agoReading the foreward > These definitions, which are not at all simple for the > beginner, came to be used in the wrong context. > Textbooks presented them before any explanation was > given of the theory and its applications, there > by complicating an understanding of things that > were intuitively clear. hear hear! This problem is like most of the Wikipedia pages that I come across on 'complex' topics of not just maths but anything remotely intersting technically. I just give up in the end. Life is too short to be bothered with some editor's 'dick measuring' competition about how clever they.
- bitcharmer 5y agoFully agreed. Maths topics pages on Wikipedia are useless for 99.9% of population. They just bombard you with alien phrases and concepts with zero explanation of what's what. It's pretty useless if you want to learn anything
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoHaving read numerous books on various aspects of mathematics written by the academia, my pet theory is that there are two kinds of people who write incomprehensible math books: - Senior professors who actually suffer from the curse of knowledge and really forgot how it is not to know certain things, so they make tons of assumptions that are obvious to them. - Junior profs who could actually explain the topics in an accessible way but do not feel secure enough and engage in a strange game of showing off. I know the same people could do a good job in the classroom, but once they get down to writing, they start to be afraid of being judged by their Senior colleagues so they follow the trodden path. I gather the books that don't fail into these two categories for my daughter so when she grows enough to be able to grasp these concepts, she won't have to do dig through tons of crap.
- gyam 5y agoWould you mind sharing the names of the books that you’ve gathered for your daughter?
- k__ 5y agoMy experience with learning math is that the first months are all about backtracking. You have to fill all your holes. It's basically one big graph of concepts. The tricky part is, most beginners simply don't know how to navigate that graph. They see complex numbers with their exponentials and cos/sin forms and shut down. They can learn all these concepts no problem, but finding what they need to learn defeats them.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoLike this? https://cognicull.com/en/f5q2jl62 https://cognicull.com/en/f5q2jl62
- rfrey 5y agoI love that! What's its story?
- 29athrowaway 5y agoIt appeared a few weeks ago in HN.
- TheFreim 5y agoLast time I took math courses was high school, algebra 2 or geometry. Do you have any resources you can suggest for not only going forward but also filling in the gaps that I've forgotten or never filled?
- BrandoElFollito 5y agoContext: I have a PhD in physics (many years ago), work in industry since then and have two high-schoolers I help in maths. I clicked on the link, the book opened on page 500-something and I said "oh fuck" loud when I saw the mess of equations. I actually thought that the rendering failed. I then moved back and the book has some down-to-earth approach but I could not stand the block of text page after page. It is truly a horrible book to learn from.
- medo-bear 5y ago> It is truly a horrible book to learn from given your lengthy experience and qualification i am surprised that typesetting is such an issue for you. perhaps the book might be helpful to you as a teacher to draw some material from. me personally, trying to recall my attitude and focus during high school, i don't think i would have minded this book at all
- amelius 5y agoWhy is this called "higher math"? It mostly covers high-school calculus and physics. And how would you call more advanced math?
- mpalmer 5y agoMaybe it has a different relationship to the average math curriculum at the time versus that of the present day.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- The_suffocated 5y agoI think in the Soviet bloc, "higher mathematics" referred to mathematics taught at higher institutions (i.e. universities or technical institutions at the same level). This usage is a bit different from that in the Commonwealth of Nations (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Further_Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Further_Mathematics for instance). As for the current text, while it does mostly cover high-school calculus, some portions of it (e.g. contour integration, analytic functions and Dirac delta function) are definitely outside high-school curricula. As the authors indicated in the preface, the intended audience of this book include high-school students, high-school teachers and first-year college students.
- mindcrime 5y agoThere really isn't any universally accepted definition of what "higher math" means. To mathematicians it seems to be something of a synonym for "proofs based maths", but for the rest of us, plenty of people use "higher math" to refer to Calculus and up. But in that sense, "higher" will always just be relative to where you already are, so honestly it's not a particularly useful term. But personally I don't think it's anything worth getting to worked up about.
- rajekas 5y agoZ-Y is a fantastic book, especially if you have a decent math education already. Soviet style math and physics education - if done well- teaches you how to think with math, i.e., mathematics as an augmentation of the human intellect in the Engelbartian sense. Somewhat paradoxically, it's a humanistic approach to mathematics education. PS: https://mirtitles.org/ https://mirtitles.org/ is a treasure trove for people who like books from the Soviet Era.