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No bullshit guide to math and physics

minireference.com

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Re: No bullshit guide to math and physics

#41

Post by zarify »

ivansavz wrote: post #13
rpm4321 wrote: post #9

I actually clicked "Buy Now" before I realized this was a physical textbook and cancelled. To me, it's almost inexcusable to market this sort of text to this type of audience and not have a digital copy. Shouldn't the barriers to entry be much lower for the author to get this out electronically? I see that the author is responding to comments here, so if you're like me and will buy it if it comes out electronically,…

I have the PDF version ready and will setup a shopping cart (ejunkie?) very soon (like tonight) because several people asked for this. Reading math in print is really good: you can flip back and forth through the pages. How much should the PDF cost? 29$ sounds a bit steep for a PDF no?

For what it is it seems pretty reasonably priced as it is. I wouldn't drop the price too much.

Also you mention formats in another comment. It'd be nice to have a choice. ePub is easier to read on some devices, but then PDF is easier to mark up (I'm thinking Goodreader) later on, which is nice for this sort of thing. Anyway, once you have an ebook version that's another sale from me :)

Re: No bullshit guide to math and physics

#42

Post by mharmon14 »

jackowayed wrote: post #3

I would adjust the tone for the "I am in Arts" section. Saying "I think you have math issues" is not the kind of welcome you want to give to people who do, in fact, have math issues. I like the end, where you emphasize that math is a great exercise in abstract thinking and modeling. But I would start with something more neutral saying something like, "Many people had suboptimal experiences with math in school because…

I disagree. Looking at the title, & reading over the preview of the book, I think that the concise, anti-politically correct tone the author uses is one of his best selling points. After all the book is titled "no bullshit". And there's already plenty of texts that use ostensibly comforting words to artists.

Re: No bullshit guide to math and physics

#43

Post by ivansavz »

pflats wrote: post #39

I read the first 10 pages of the pdf. I'm not sure who you think your target audience is, but this book doesn't seem to serve any of them. You gloss over huge sections of algebra, and in doing so, ignore incredibly common mistakes that students make. Take a look at the top of page 9, 6 \sqrt{x} - 7 = [...]. You solve that out, but give no reason as to why you got rid of the 7 first, the 6 second, and the radical thir…

You are right about the history, though I was specifically talking about the usage of the word "number" not about whether people knew about fractions. I won't dig up the reference, now, but I read in a history of Calculus treatise somewhere that Newton was the first who started using the word "number" in its present sense: any quantity including integers, rationals or irrationals.

Thx for spotting the f(x-h) typo. Fixed.

Re: No bullshit guide to math and physics

#44

Post by ivansavz »

sonabinu wrote: post #36

This is pretty interesting stuff. Out of curiosity, have you thought of an interactive book? It brings higher level concepts alive.

I am a big fan of "choose your own adventure" kind of books, and I will try to do something with that soon.

For the physics part, I also have a simple physics game engine which is in the works. Instead of answering questions about different //points// of the motion the user would have to specify the js function which describes the entire motion. There will be not "grades" just test suites your code has to pass ;)

What do you have in mind exactly when you say "interactive book"?

Re: No bullshit guide to math and physics

#45

Post by eigenvector »

danielford wrote: post #35
return0 wrote: post #8

The pitch "textbooks suck" seems so disrespectful and tasteless, it literally makes me avoid that book. Most of my uni textbooks did not suck at all.

I teach college biology, and I've never seen a textbook in my discipline that wasn't written in a soporific and meandering style. Some are worse than others, but I've never seen a textbook I thought was good. If I needed to fill a gap in my knowledge or learn a new subject I would never resort to a textbook until I had exhausted every other available option.

That may well be true in your discipline, but there are some excellent, concise texts in undergraduate mathematics. For example, Apostol's Calculus or Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds. Not the most accessible texts by a longshot, but not your average Pearson or Wiley drivel either.

Re: No bullshit guide to math and physics

#47

Post by ivansavz »

anonymous987983 wrote: post #30

Here's a picture from the examples: http://minireference.com/miniref/lib/tpl/miniref/landings/im... I'm not a big fan of that picture. We're trying to compute f'(400), judging by the text (scroll down a bit on the first page). What the image suggests, afaict, is that f'(400) that can be computed as the limit [f(x+h) - f(x-h)]/2h with x=400 and h -> 0 (in the picture, we see the case h=80). At least the graphic appear…

> I'm not a big fan of that picture. We're > trying to compute f'(400), >

Well, technically speaking, you are not supposed to talk about derivatives in the picture answer. I am just trying to connect the notion of "download rate" with the "slope of the file size function".

The triangle with the hypotenuse touching the function (tangent line) is a way to compute the slope from the graph. As such the actual size of the triangle is not important -- so long as it helps you compute the rise-over-run.

So to answer your question -- the triangle is not meant to illustrate the derivative calculation. Indeed, it would be quite difficult to show an infinitely small triangle ;)

Re: No bullshit guide to math and physics

#48

Post by madhadron »

I hesitated to post this, since I think clearer, shorter, better written textbooks are an admirable goal, and I keep a (short) list of good text books I have found over the years. But based on the preview on the website, I'm going to keep referring those who ask me to Gelfand's wonderful basic math texts instead (Algebra, Method of Coordinates, Functions and Their Graphs, Trigonometry -- anyone who wants further pointers to these, private message me).

There are also some howlers in the preview text, such as "after thinking very hard the mathematicians were able to classify all the different number like objects into sets" and then lists the naturals, integers, rationals, reals, and complex numbers. Except that these are nested subsets of each other, not disjoint, and the four normed division algebras are the reals, complexes numbers, quaternions, and octionions, so if you're going to talk about all the number like objects without including those last two, you're off the mark.

I haven't seen the physics sections, but I will say that teaching physics is actually remarkably difficult. I tend to recommend 1960s editions of Halliday and Resnick (not the recent ones!), though I will probably switch to recommending Karl Wiemann's work (http://c21.phas.ubc.ca/).

I absolutely agree that mechanics and the differential and integral calculus should be taught together, though. They don't make any sense without each other.

Re: No bullshit guide to math and physics

#49

Post by mscarborough »

I appreciate the goal and the bold tone. I volunteer time to tutor middle and high school kids in math. It would be nice to have a fresh approach available, and a hard copy or four would be nice.

Would it be possible to create a version without the 'bullshit' language? Outside of the cover there are two 'bullshits' in the first chapter. It doesn't bother me but I don't think the directors of my program or parents would be very happy about it.

I'm sure the kids would like it but in a program such as ours, adding unnecessary friction to the relationship with parents is not a good idea. The older kids are spending time in our program that could be used to work jobs to help support their family (and it is a real pressure on these kids and families), so anything that threatens that is a non-starter.

Re: No bullshit guide to math and physics

#50

Post by phaus »

rodh257 wrote: post #26
ivansavz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the PDF version ready and will setup a shopping cart (ejunkie?) very soon (like tonight) because several people asked for this. Reading math in print is really good: you can flip back and forth through the pages. How much should the PDF cost? 29$ sounds a bit steep for a PDF no?

For reference have a look at the % price difference for other book sellers, like O'Reilly: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596802363.do I'd be selling it for $24 for Ebook (and make it available in PDF/Epub/Mobi to cover all readers), $29 for print, $32 for Print + Ebook.

Please listen to this guy's suggestion of making the price for both only marginally higher than the price for the Print version alone. One of the quickest ways to kill my interest in in purchasing a book is by expecting someone to pay a non-trivial amount of money for a digital copy after they just purchased a hard copy at full retail.

As far as pricing the ebook alone, I think it should be somewhere around 14.99 to 19.99.

If it helps, I am probably a good example of your target customer. I didn't take my education seriously until I was out of high school for a few years, and now I find myself trying to catch up with all of the stuff I should have learned when I was younger.

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