The 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.
Higher Math for Beginners (1987)
11–20 of 99 posts
Re: Higher Math for Beginners (1987)
#12The 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.
Actually 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.
Re: Higher Math for Beginners (1987)
#13The 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.
Actually 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.
My 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
> 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.
Re: Higher Math for Beginners (1987)
#14The 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.
Classical books are usually much more engineering oriented than modern ones, with many more applications.
The thing is that most applications are just ordinary things: tou are not going to go much deeper than angular momentum and/or the Stoked-Gauss theorem for electric-magnetic fields.
Re: Higher Math for Beginners (1987)
#15The 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.
Why would you say that? The kind of mathematics that book presents has barely changed in the last 200 years. I would doubt there's much difference to speak of at all.
Re: Higher Math for Beginners (1987)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually 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.
My 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 > In addition to well-explained solutions, this manual includes corrections and clarifications to the classic text…
I 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.
Re: Higher Math for Beginners (1987)
#17The 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.
Why would you say that? The kind of mathematics that book presents has barely changed in the last 200 years. I would doubt there's much difference to speak of at all.
Because while the field of mathematics has probably not changed, the field of didactics has changed drastically, and the student expectations in 1980s and 2021 will be also drastically different.
Re: Higher Math for Beginners (1987)
#18Awesome book. Thanks. I've been needing to get back on my mathematics studies. This fits the bill perfectly.
Re: Higher Math for Beginners (1987)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you say that? The kind of mathematics that book presents has barely changed in the last 200 years. I would doubt there's much difference to speak of at all.
Because while the field of mathematics has probably not changed, the field of didactics has changed drastically, and the student expectations in 1980s and 2021 will be also drastically different.
Has it actually improved though? Every study I've seen says students are worse at maths today than 30 years ago, so to me it doesn't look like all that pedagogy research improved things. If things actually got better we should have strong evidence supporting that. Images are prettier, sure, but do students who study using modern books actually understand the material better after the course is done?
Re: Higher Math for Beginners (1987)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you say that? The kind of mathematics that book presents has barely changed in the last 200 years. I would doubt there's much difference to speak of at all.
Because while the field of mathematics has probably not changed, the field of didactics has changed drastically, and the student expectations in 1980s and 2021 will be also drastically different.
Not so much with respect to Maths: either you integrate volumes or you do not, and the theory is essentially “dumb”.
As long as you know what a derivative is, all integral and vector calculus is just a comination of “look at the problem with an infinite loupe and then add all those values “.
DiffEq is more or less similar.
Classical maths was very well taught: examples and applications galore.