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Comment by c-smile | Hacker News Reader

I was comparing my math books (from Soviet university, Physics and Applied Math) and my son's from Canadian university (CS).

Huge difference to be honest. Canadian ones (same as in US I think) were more like belletristic texts written with the goal to give basics without too much thought needed by the reader.

In contrast you cannot approach Soviet text math book without serious thinking effort. You need to overcome some mental barrier to get into. If you cannot do that then this is not yours - choose something else.

I believe that is because of different motivations of high-school systems. University on the West gets its money directly from students so they motivated to attract and keep as many students as possible - so books are entry level to do not scare students. Barrier here is established from "paying user" side.

In USSR universities were getting money from state/society as education was free so they must maintain those barriers so only those who went through were there. Barrier here is from "service provider" side.

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>University on the West gets its money directly from students so they motivated to attract and keep as many students as possible - so books are entry level to do not scare students. Barrier here is established from "paying user" side.

I guess Western Europe isn't part of the West anymore.

Yes, and actually Soviet/Russian education system has it roots in classic German one where Spießrutenlaufen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_the_gauntlet) was a great educational tool (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birching#/media/File:Koerperst...).

Combined with the parent comment, I think that makes it a perverse incentive here, depending on who is setting yhe standards.

Rather than straw man the Prussian system you could iron man it.

Corporal punishment was common when the Prussian system was founded (1800s) across the world.

The system provided free education for the lowest rungs of society for the first time in Europe, that's a mighty achievement!

Pedagogically it is a hierarchical system with a strong focus on authority. It doesn't encourage questioning authority outside of the sciences which is a feature for the authoritarian societies deploying this educational model.

Spießrutenlaufen was used by the military and was a severe, often fatal punishment. It was certainly not a great educational tool.

I think, he is confusing the figurative meaning with the real punishment. The former is not un-common in Germany even today. And yes, it has - or had - some relation to a certain concept of pedagogy. Cruel, but at times also positively personality-forming.

Ha!

With my University diploma I've also got a rank of Lieutenant-reserve of РВСН (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Missile_Forces) so the procedure is metaphorically close :D

Depends. It seems to me that in general, post-USSR, school textbooks went through a nosedive in quality. I was educated in the 90s and 2000s in Poland, and experienced the modern, "capitalist" textbooks. At the same time, my grandfather showed me books from 60s-80s period. World of a difference.

What I remember the most was the contrast between the English language textbooks from ~80s vs. the ones I had in school. The modern ones basically exist for both publishers and schools to milk parents. They come in three or four pieces - a book and an exercise book for students, and then an exercise book with answers and some compendium for teachers. That's four books, structured in a way that necessitates attending (and paying for) classes. Meanwhile, the 60s-80s era English books were structured for self-learning. You could work through them with the help of a teacher, or you could do it alone.

(Note that while being self-contained, they've also managed to be smaller. That's because they were free of space fillers. Being set on something one step up from a typewriter limited the amount of bullshit designers could include to zero.)

By the time I was finishing high school in 2007, the regular public school's textbooks for subjects like Polish, math and physics have suffered from the same disease English language books did - they've been split into several pieces, refreshed yearly (ensuring there's almost no second-hand market for them), and structured in such a way you couldn't learn on your own.

I have a few of my grandfather's English books in my basement somewhere; I decided to keep them for my children, so that they have a quality textbook to learn from.

Can say the same for Sweden. Somehow it also had this change at the same time.

In Denmark, universities (and possibly high schools too, I don't know for sure) get paid by the government based on the number of students passing exams every semester. I think this is part of what's called "new public management" where you attempt to bring market-like incentives to the public sector.

Interesting, universities in Czech republic went through a simmilar scheme, but they'd get disproportionately more funds per head-count of first-year students (on-boarding, I guess?)

Several universities switched from entrance exams to a system of "Everybody gets in, it is the first semester that will probably kill you" :-)

That actually sounds like it might work. I know a lot of people who just scraped through exams but excelled in University as well as a number who aced their exams but struggled and/or dropped out in University (admittedly this was more due to picking easy subjects in High School).

Same in Poland for more than a decade. It's an open secret here that universities admit many more students than they can handle in order to capture extra funding, and then get rid of the excess after the first year.

On my first year, the amount of students was 2x the actual capacity. The first semester was very math-heavy, and everyone knew we had the toughest and CS-unrelated subjects delivered up front in order to weed out half of the year.

My university did it, but because the entrance exams can't evaluate students well, while a semester is quite a more precise and prolonged test.

Yes, I agree it can work out fairly well :-)

On the other hand, I have seen a prof. literaly say something along the lines "Dear students, my purpose here is not to teach you anything, just weed out 50% of you"

Attempting to force market-like incentives on the public sector often ends up working even worse than a purely public system, it seems to me. Use public or private, but mixing the two leads to odd incentive issues and bad outcomes.

I'm in Western Europe. University courses get funding based on how many students are in the class. It links directly so "bums on seats" = €€. This money comes from the state but it has the same effect.

IMO, the point of textbooks is to educate people on some topic so making them as easy as possible seems like the correct choice. Outside of competitions, the value most people get from those courses is what them remember in 5+ years when their working not really the kind of symbol manipulation that makes can make things opaque.

That said, soviet style education produced a lot of great mathematicians especially relative to population sizes. But it’s not clear to me if that’s an outgrowth of better education or economic forces.

Somewhat cynically, I think the point of many textbooks is to make money for the authors.

There is no reason why a calculus book needs to cost $200 (in the 1990’s) and get refreshed every 2-3 years. That subject has been known for hundreds of years and they rob poor engineering and science student of that $200.

Sorry, I just have a bad taste in my mouth from crap like that in undergrad. Not saying you’re wrong, just think it’s more greed oriented than we’d like to think.

Not only that, but the books are horrible! Authors are incentivized to throw as much verbiage as possible, and this makes students' lives more difficult. It is much preferable to have a more concise book that goes to the core of what you need to learn.

Agreed 1,000,000% !

If Stan Lee wrote calculus textbooks, everyone would be good at math. [0]

[0] - ok, so I came up with that off the top of my head. But the more I think about it, the better the idea seems to me. Any thoughts?

No, almost nothing of the $200 actually goes to the author. A typical share goes like this: (concrete numbers for Germany) 50% of the sticker price goes to the book seller, 7% to tax, the remainder to printing, typesetting, logistics, the publishing house etc.

A typical author would get somewhere between 4-7% of the net sales. Most books, especially advanced science books, on the market (not your College 101, not NYT bestsellers) sell only in the order of hundreds, maybe a few thousand copies. The vast majority of books doesn't even earn the advance back. The reason why they are often not good, is that it takes months to write 500 pages of well-thought out, well-delivered material, and the incentive to do that for $5000 is relatively low.

1,000 students per semester times $10 bucks is money I wouldn’t mind having.

Professors write tons of pages on various topics as part of their job. We call that “research”. Not sure why contributing to a book effort should be looked at any differently than research papers.

Plus, from an economic sense, when you lower the price of a compliment, your demand g or price ) goes up. So it’s actually in a university’s interest to provide books for free (or very low cost).

The few thousand copies is over the _entire_ lifetime of a book, not meant per year. Again, your College 101 book in Physics or Calculus will be used in large courses and thus sell a large volume, if it is being that used that is. There are also many competitors in the market, and yours might not see significant pickup.

So, let's suppose that you indeed sell 1,000 copies at $150 a piece. Your share is 6% of the net sales, so $8370. From this you need to pay services such as the person making the index, or pay royalty for pictures (yes, many publishing houses deduct this from the author's earnings).

Let's say your book has 700 pages, which is pretty normal volume size, and after you paid for additional services and expenses you are left with $7000. You are a good writer, so planning the book, writing it, creating examples, copy-editing and rewriting it, making reference solutions, etc. and you only spend on average 4h per page. You have made $2.50 / hour before tax. And you probably have a PhD in that topic.

Books form an interesting part of this HN posting anyway: I'm from East Germany and at that time I got much of the mathematical scientific literature as quite cheap (regarded to money, even workmanship, but not to content) russian translations from the Soviet Union. They were also quite fast in producing these, very close to the original publication (*).

The pricing model of the current locked-in science publication sector is completely ridiculous, counter-productive and even unjustified (research in many countries is supported by taxes, than the result should be free to the public). But luckily this changes with open access - legal and not yet legal.

edit: and not to forget, in some areas the soviet school of mathematics (meant as specific incarnation of mathematics as a discipline in the country) was excellent in itself.

I've heard about this, it seems to be an American phenomenon. I taught applied mathematics at a UK Russel group university for 10 years, I started each course with "You do not need any books for this course, the lectures suffice; if you want to read around the subject I would recommend [2 or 3 Dover editions at £10-15] or [a couple of classics I was sure were in the library]". Most other lecturers did the same.

> point of textbooks is to educate people on some topic so making them as easy as possible seems like the correct choice

It is not possible to “educate” someone about mathematics or math-heavy technical fields without convincing them to put in some serious time and effort thinking deeply about hard problems.

Many US high school (and even undergraduate) textbooks are more or less analogous to taking a look-out-from-the-bus tour of rock climbing sites, or maybe like teaching an advanced wood shop class by making students assemble IKEA furniture.

Textbooks should be exciting and fun, but “as easy as possible” is a terrible goal.

I think they mean "as easy as possible," in the sense of Einstein(?;) - 'An explanation should be as easy as /possible/, but not easier;' or something like that. - (?)

I and all this ^ might be wrong, though.

I have actually learned an awful lot from assembling Ikea furniture. Some of those patterns make their way into my own little projects nowadays.

In Canadian universities you typically have 3 to 5 levels of mathematics courses for students specializing in something other than math. The highest level of rigour would only be found in the courses for mathematicians, with physics, engineering and computer science students studying many of the same concepts but less rigorously and with comparatively little attention to deriving results from first principles. Was the approach the same in the USSR?

First 3 years all students of all Sciences (Math included) and all Engineering specialties were getting the same (mandatory) set of courses. Only rest 2 or 3 years were variable.

As of Canadian Universities. UBC in particular.

Anecdotical evidence, but still.

Friend of mine, owner of small factory here in Vancouver, asked me once to assemble him software department specifically from Eastern Europe people. On question "why?" he answered - they are engineers first and programmers only second, and UBC makes CS people.

> asked me once to assemble him software department specifically from Eastern Europe people

I hope your friend realizes that this is clear-cut racial/ethnicity-based discrimination.

It's a violation of the Canadian Human Rights Act, see: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/rights-w...

A generous interpretation is they were outsourcing the work, and the business wanted it to be outsourced to a company in Eastern Europe.

That's an even more interesting thought when you apply it to one-man bands. If the only employment is someone self-employing, then presumable the client can discriminate in such ways.

I suppose if you try to do it at scale though there are other mechanisms for calling you out on deliberately circumventing the spirit of the law.

I thought in the West the preferred term is “affirmative action.”

> I hope your friend realizes that this is clear-cut racial/ethnicity-based discrimination.

That is absolutely orthogonal to business requirements to be honest.

Especially when you need to establish production of anything as primitive as N95s.

Of course you can send airplanes all around the world for them (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-at-least-tw...) but when they will return empty, that thin reasoning layer will vaporize almost immediately.

No? If we interpret his intentions generously, he didn't say he only wanted to hire people of Eastern European descent, but people who went through their education system. This can include people from any ethnic group that happens to have people living there. That's like saying it's racial discrimination to only hire people who went to MIT.

> University on the West gets its money directly from students

Actually, many if not most of them get the majority of their funding from government research grants and investments of their endowment, not tuition.

Doesn't matter from the pov of the university. The GP's point was that 'money source' and 'educational facility' are the same in USSR, but not in the West.

Read, then reread, and still do not understand your point.

Are you saying that in Russia, since the education was free that the goal of the textbooks was to make it hard to want to stay in school, if so, to me, seems like it’s unlikely, but possible.

Putting aside non-Russian textbooks, what are you saying the intended reasoning of the textbook form was as it relates to Russian culture?

I think the reasoning is that the incentives are flipped. Capitalist school gets more money the more you stick around. Communist school spends more money the more you stick around. One has a perverse incentive to get as many people to pass as possible. The other has a perverse incentive to get as many people to fail as possible.

One would think Russia would have demand for strong advanced mathematics professionals, so unclear how failing students might help that. Missing something in the reasoning though, since I get that if you’re giving away something for free, you want to maximize the yield it returns, but still, it does not add up to me.

Further, reasoning that American schools get money might hold true for tuition based schools, but my understanding is that large percentage of pre-university mathematics courses are taught for free. So again, doesn’t make sense to me, because if that was the case, all schools would charge and majority of students would finish university to maximize the profits, and again, this does not match my understanding of how things work.

I think the point is that Russia's programs isolated those who had a talent/passion for math as opposed to just trying to bring every student to a basic level of understanding. If a student doesn't have the drive/talent/passion for a field, it follows that they will not perform as well in the workforce as their driven/talented/enthusiastic peers.

> was to make it hard to want to stay in school

That is probably not that intentionally. That is just a result of my own observations.

As of culture:

Canadian mother: John, you are so smart, why you cannot solve this quiz?

Russian mother: Ivan, why you cannot solve this quiz, are you stupid?

Anecdotic exaggeration of course, but there is definitely something in it.

Yes, basically it's sort of a filter to get the people who coast mostly out. Free college means everybody goes to college for bad reasons, or no reason at all, just because everybody else does. I mean, some people openly told me they joined the CS program because they wanted to avoid the draft - a total waste of education.

So, for example the first ~2.5 years (out of 5.5) of my CS degree were mostly about some pretty brutal math units, each with an exam. There was also other stuff from entry level CS to physics to some token humanity courses but that was easy for most. If you were inclined/smart/persistent enough to master the math (or, sadly, as some did that being Russia - not sure how prevalent that was in the USSR - bribe your way when you failed), you could continue to the easier more fun later years where you actually studied some CS. A considerable number of people transferred or dropped out.

>Are you saying that in Russia, since the education was free that the goal of the textbooks was to make it hard to want to stay in school, if so, to me, seems like it’s unlikely,

in publicly funded systems students cost money, so there's an incentive to control cost. In privately-funded systems, students make money (in particular with universal loans), so everyone's a paying customer and nobody turns those away.

Germany has roughly half the university graduation rate compared to the US, and this is the same reason why the US gives you 8 late-stage cancer treatments and the NHS gives you 2, or why sometimes you don't get the super expensive medicine you want.

I don't think the books were made hard intentionally.

From what I understand, in the US, the same course on, say, Introduction to Calculus, can be attended by people who are learning to be MDs, chemical engineers, accountants and mathematicians because there is no fixed curriculum and everyone can pick up that course. So the textbooks and courses need to be as accessible as possible to accommodate a wide range of aptitudes.

In Russia/USSR, at least till 90s (don't know if it's still true since there had been a movement to "westernize" education) you enrolled into a major, not a school, and the whole class had the same curriculum for the first two years with some specialization starting on the third year (the whole program is 5-6 years). So students with the same major go to the same courses, which are not shared with any other majors. In this system Introduction to Calculus for mathematicians will be very different from the course with the same name for sociologists and does not have to be as accessible for people who do not really care about strictness of proofs, structure and other "mathy" stuff.

it's/was the same in ex yugoslavia countries.

No. Because education was free, they could make the books harder. They didn't depend on students pumping money into schools. Didn't have to pretend to be "nice".

(I grew up and went to college in the Eastern Bloc.)

USSR needed X engineers per year. The universities had to set their entry requirements high/low enough to only allow X*1.0X to enroll. Once enrolled, they were ambitious enough to only allow the best to survive. They watched their bell curves and adjusted accordingly. I'm almost sure the Ministry of Higher Education would publish the guidelines on how to achieve that.

Or perhaps the “hardcore” texts are just poorly written?

Yeah, that's what I said, "poorly written" is a criteria that can be applied to belletristic more than to science text books.

Russian math books have just few words, formulas are the rest. What can be poorly written there?

Kidding :)

Au contraire, they’re some of the best textbooks I’ve had the fortune of reading! :-)

They make the student work (participate actively in your own education), which I’ve noticed that American textbooks (at least modern high school & college textbooks) seem loath to do. I don’t know why — you don’t develop what you don’t exercise!

If you open any soviet textbook you will see the following text on title page: (loosely translated) "Supplementary reading for students of xx specialties higher education" it can school level or college level. But in essence those books are an addition to the course which is mainly delivered by lectures. You can study by yourself but it will be hard and you will need extra material to replace lectures.

Having worked from translations and occasionally originals of some of the Russian texts, they're actually utterly marvelous.

Same situation in Romania, some of the best math problem books I found were a bunch of books printed before 1980's. The problems were just wonderful. I was desperately searching for them for my kids through my father's library.

In 1990's after the revolution we got humanitarian aid from Western Europe, including some French math textbooks. They were so low level (simple) I was in disbelief. Useless.

I had the same reaction in Poland, when my grandfather gave me some textbooks from his collection. They were an order of magnitude better than what I was using at school.

and, somehow, the economic and social system in France is much better than the one in Romania

my take is that the western-style school focuses on getting students life skills, while the eastern-Europe one focuses on cramming knowledge in the brain

Maybe it's also the context, the gradual buildup France had over Romania at the time and now. Romania endured the communist regime for many decades and was very much isolated.

Can you please share some books you enjoyed?

What subjects are you after?

Also, the enjoyment was not supposed to be from reading the book, it was from passing the exam.

Not OP, if you know any great English translated Linear Algebra title or statistics.

Unfortunately the ones I know were not translated.

The ones I spent most time with were volumes titled (translated) "Selected problems in higher mathematics." I worked out of a German translation for one volume while I learned a smattering of Russian and then the Russian for a second one. This was to fill in assumed background in things like integration that was assumed by Landau & Lifshitz.

It's been long enough where I have no idea of the author.

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