61–70 of 99 posts
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Last 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?
in your case i would suggest khan academy - https://www.khanacademy.org/math
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Fully 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
Having 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 a…
Anyone who has actually tried to teach students knows this is false. Merely trying to be understood fails with high probability. The average math or physics grad student upon entering already knows more than they have any chance of explaining thoroughly; distinguishing between senior and junior professors puts that line much further away than it really is.
It's plausible that a sort of follow-the-template dynamic entrenches bad pedagogy, but I would think that the reason authors defensively stick to the old patterns is not because they worry about being judged, but rather the concern that they will do students a disservice if they are not "better than the Beatles":
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22378269/
In other words, rather than risk being blamed for using a progression that works poorly, it's safer to follow the old patterns, so that tradition is blamed instead — nobody ever got fired for teaching IBM^W the geometry sandwich.
Why is this called "higher math"? It mostly covers high-school calculus and physics. And how would you call more advanced math?
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This sounds entitled.
Sounds 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.
Are pages 358, 373, 379, 396, 530 misprinted or scanned sloppily?
The 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/detail…
Why is this called "higher math"? It mostly covers high-school calculus and physics. And how would you call more advanced math?
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I haven't worked through the book yet but looking at the authors, Yaglom wrote some great Math books and Zeldovich was an absolutely genius in the field of theoretical physics, so it probably is. As a German living in the Western part, my math teacher would always rant how much better the East German math books were. Math and science education in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc was and still is vastly superior…
Having the same background, I often heard this praise too, though mostly for Soviet works. But every time I followed up on it, I found that even the introductory level books dug right into the depths without much explanation. They might have been good in rigor or depth, but I found them very lacking didactically. Maybe I looked at the wrong ones. Your link seems to suggest that it's different for textbooks aimed at y…
A good example of a introductory book with good didactic is Probability Theory (first steps) by Wentzel. https://archive.org/details/ProbabilityTheoryfirstSteps/mode...
Also Physics of Everyone, though maybe a bit more difficult: https://archive.org/details/LandauKitaigorodskyPhysicsForEve...
Link to all the Mir titles: https://archive.org/details/mir-titles
There are books for basically every level and age there.
Why is this called "higher math"? It mostly covers high-school calculus and physics. And how would you call more advanced math?
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.
dont judge a math book by its date. also i found math books by russian or ex-soviet authors to be quite good, esp those by vladimir arnold