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Mir Books

mirtitles.org

132 pointsweinzierl28 comments

Many many years ago, I used to take the 560 from Kamal Cinema to Connaught Place (in Delhi for those who don't know these references) with a couple of geeky friends.

We would walk from the CP bus terminus to Connaught Circle, grab a bite to eat at Nirulas and then make the pilgrimage to the MIR store, which used to occupy a huge space right in the middle of the circle. I don't even know what's in that space now. Probably a McDonalds or a jewelry store.

That's where I bought books by Piskunov, Nikolskii, Perelman and many many other books. I still remember being puzzled that every discovery that had one name attached to it in the the western texts that I got out of the British Council Library - the next stop in the pilgrimage - had another name, usually ending in -ov or -sky attached to it in the MIR books.

That was before the end of the Soviet Union, liberalization and Shining India. That world has faded away faster than my imagined memories of Gondor.

Delhi had a Mir store?? I wish I'd known.

My only access to Mir books as a 10-13 year old in Punjab was an annual 'book fair' consisting of a few roofless stalls of Mir books laid out in the local market. They were fantastic books about science, math, astronomy, engineering and at Rs 10-20 it was amazing as a kid to buy many books at one go.

Was it a Mir store? Or is it People’s Publication office/bookstore? The book store/publishing house run by ICP? They are still around. They used to stock Progress Publication books too - USSR’s literary cousin of Mir (they’ve stopped stocking Mir now). I am not from Delhi but whenever I’d visit I’d go there to check out some translations, especially Hindi translations of Russian works. I still go - I was introduced to Russian literature in Hindi and I still crave for that. I bought Cossacks’s Hindi translation few months back.

PS. I bought my first IE Irodov in Delhi though. Sunday market.

It wasn't called MIR for sure. People's Publishing House or some variant sounds about right. I am amazed that it's still there - does it occupy a cavernous space in the heart of the circle?

Edit: it's quite possible that what's called PPH now is the inheritor of the space I used to go to, but it's not the same space as far as I can tell from online photos.

PPH isn’t tiny but wouldn’t call it very big either. The only other book store from there I recall was named something like The English Book Store. I’ve been going there since 2004ish only I think. Once in 2-3 years maybe. I’m going to Delhi in a few weeks, if I manage to visit Connaught Place I’ll look/ask around :)

Ah, a Mir book, what a nostalgia trip. A friend of mine gave me a physical-chemistry lab textbook (translated to Spanish) and it has been the best scientific undergraduate lab book I have ever used (as student and lab teacher). Very nice experiments and explanations. The only con is that, as with many soviet things at the time, they barely gave any recognition to the western european scientific legacy, so almost any principle you associate with a western European name(Boyles Law, Avogadro Number, etc) was named after a soviet scientist who supposedly discovered it first. To be honest I never bothered to research about how valid were those claims.

I am the maintainer/curator of the mirtitles blog. Please also have a look at our gitlab page where we are typesetting some of the classics in LaTeX

https://gitlab.com/mirtitles

Thank you for this. It is indeed a labour of love. Keep up the great work. Your work on the layout for Tarasov's book on Symmetry is outstanding and must have taken a lot of effort and patience.

Of course, you are still working on it as you continue to clean it up. Just noticed a minor issue in the image layout in pg. 64 of the document (pg. 72 of the PDF) where Fig. 50 covers some text. Perhaps related to this: https://gitlab.com/mirtitles/tarasov-symmetry/blob/master/05...

Thanks again, your work is greatly appreciated.

That's a stunning quality curation, really impressive!

I would love to see more math books in there. There are some great and dear books from my youth that do not still appear...

Just one question: what is the motivation for re-typesetting the text? The original typeset was already beautiful. Why didn't you go the way of simply giving an OCRd pdf ?

The motivation was purely electronic text, though OCR is good for text for mathematics it may not be that good. And it is fun typesetting the books you love!

What is the license / copyright status of these works? I am interested in possibly doing a similar project and I am wondering if these are unencumbered / free for redistribution.

Wow, thanks! This is beautiful:

https://gitlab.com/mirtitles/tarasov-symmetry

If the Soviet Union did one thing right, Mir was it. I owe my love to applied math to it.

My native is Russian. For those who don't know, Mir translates as: 1. World, 2. Peace, 3. Microcosm, 4. Non-Religious life (в миру).

There were also Italian translations of Russian books, which were very popular slightly before my time as a student.

On the other hand one of my most prized possessions is a hardcover version of Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games in Russian that I bought at a flea market for less than $2.

In Soviet Union "Mir" was well-known for its translations of foreign scientific and technical literature. I never realized "Mir" published English translations of Russian books too.

In my (very one-sided and biased) opinion Soviet Union was a very provincial country immensely handicapped in its scientific and cultural life by being cut off from the world. (Although it might not look like that in 1960s when it was proudly going into space and testing atomic weapons.) But there existed good fundamental science and some original thinkers and authors worth translating and studying.

Mir publications (in English and other languages) were very popular in many countries of the world where they were affordable and available. It was one of the best things to come out of the Soviet era. They were excellent across the board. It is fashionable nowadays to badmouth everything "Soviet" but their focus on educating the masses in Science & Technology was farsighted.

See my responses in this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346272 where i am exhorting people to bring them back into print :-)

From the above same thread, link to the archive - https://archive.org/details/@mirtitles?&sort=-publicdate&pag...

I am the maintainer/curator of the mirtitles blog. Thanks for the comment, we had thought of republishing also. Perhaps Little Mathematics Library comes to mind first due to the smaller number of pages. But it got stalled due to other commitments that I had. But we are surely looking in this direction as well.

Thanks for responding and Appreciate all your hard work on this. This knowledge needs to be saved for posterity.

Just thinking aloud, why not approach the Russian publishing houses (and maybe the Russian govt. itself?) to get behind this and fund it? Or maybe a tie-up with well-known technical book publishers like Oxford/Cambridge publishing (i myself am partial to Dover Publications) to start a line under "Mir Titles"? A few professors to edit out the obvious propaganda material and everything should be good for mass market. I sense a good business opportunity here :-)

Come on it’s not being biased but completely blind (I don’t want to get banned otherwise I’d use another word).

Out of nowhere: Kantorovich, Kolmogorov, Smirnov, Markov, Chebychev, Chernoff, Sobolev, Egorov, Novikov, Galerkine, Levenstein, Alexandrov... etc.

Some could cite physicists like Sakharov, Bronstein, Friedmann, Ginzburg... etc.

Their approach to Variational Calculus was very unique back then ahead of their time. Speaking of... I forgot to mention Pontryagin!

They messed a lot of stuff but not their academy, nor the mass education.

I've just been reading "Love and Math" by Edward Frenkel, which I recommend for his view of modern mathematics. His take on Soviet science was that math and physics (and maybe other hard sciences) were mostly left outside of Communist party control, while things like literature, humanities, psychology, ... things where party officials might not hesitate to express an ill-formed opinion, were dormant or party-controlled nonsense during the Soviet era. Frenkel is a Soviet-born mathematician who left the country just before Glasnost, who was discriminated against for having a Jewish surname.

Many of the standard introductory Soviet textbooks at the high school / undergraduate level in math, physics, chemistry, etc. were excellent, better than the most common western textbooks. They also sold them cheaply around the world, and they become standard classics in many countries.

I’m not sure how their more advanced textbooks stack up. But there were clearly a large number of world-class scientists and mathematicians there.

it published in several languages. http://leseditionsmir.free.fr/

Some are widely regarded classics like Landau & Lifshitz’ course on physics.

When I was a kid, I used to buy handful of Russian books (translated to English) for the price of one American book. For a poor kid, it was awesome. Ah, good days they were...

Brings back great memories of solving I.E Irodov's problems in physics. Made you feel like a genius whenever you cracked one.

I usually do not comment on threads. But upvote for sure! This one is different. Nostalgia, First Science Education... What not! Thanks a lot for the website.

The TeX recreations are amazingly good quality. I would like to buy professional prints of some of them, but it does not seem that they are selling them.

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