Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography (1999)

ocf.berkeley.edu

42 pointsTomte20 comments

I'm amazed this is still live - I've literally been seeing this listing on and off for two decades.

It could probably use some updating.

There's also a physics version: https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicphys.htm

Shout-out to UC Berkeley's Open Computing Facility (OCF) which has managed to host this content for decades.

It's surprising how little the list has changed since then, really, at the more advanced end: at my place we still teach real analysis from Rudin, complex from Ahlfors, commutative algebra from Atiyah-Macdonold, riemannian geometry from do Carmo, alg geo from Shafarevich and Hartshorne,.. There are good competitors to some of these now but inertia is strong. (And if anyone has figured out how to teach a good intro to schemes out of Vakil's behemoth of a book, let me know...)

There seems to be only so much one can cram into an undergraduate's cranium in 4 years. Consequently the average time spent getting Ph.D. is increasing.

Varkil himself taught a "Algebraic Geometry in the Time of COVID" last year: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCy3u23mZE4TyW88yr6JLx9A/video...

Yes, it was very cool (I had a student sit in), but it wasn't anything like an introduction to schemes course. They made it to the nullstellensatz in the last lecture. I love Vakil's book but my attempt to teach out of it was not so successful, there is just too much there.

> Dummit/Foote, Abstract algebra

> In fact, overall I would use this book as a reference instead of a primary text, because the idea of reading it through from start to finish scares me.

That tome scared me too. If you want to self-study abstract algebra, either Fraleigh's "A First Course in Abstract Algebra" or Paulsen's "Abstract Algebra: An Interactive Approach" is a better choice IMHO. Both are more accessible, come with detailed explanations, and the Paulsen book is even accompanied by SageMath code snippets for you to run.

Oh God, Spivak. The name gives me flashbacks to my first year at U of C. I arrived thinking I was smart about math things. That book humbled me bad. A tough beginning to four tough, lonely years.

Spivak is brutal. But's its powerful medicine. There's a reason why the U of C can have large numbers of students take real analysis in their second year! Getting through spivak makes analysis much much easier

To this day I still actually have a physical reaction of nausea when hearing the numbers 162 and 163.

Very simple in design, neat, to the point. Does anyone know if there's a Jekyll template that generates such a neat/nostalgic output?

Just delete all CSS files!

This isn't a joke.

The webpage has no stylesheet.

This is just how web browsers have rendered unstyled text for as long as I've been using web browsers (probably about as long as this website has existed).

I mean, just look at it. HTML 4 Transitional. Uppercase tags. And a note from the author that browsers don't handle the "new" standard completely, yet.

It's a gem.

I see a lot of affiliations mentioned in the page, and I think I might be missing some context.

What's the relationship between the author (Chris Jeris) and the OCF user hosting the content (Abhishek Roy)? Also, what is Chicago in the title referencing?

The university of chicago

<Immediately clicks to Calculus>... "Spivak". Yup, list is legit.

The physics list is even better!

Can anyone please make a mooc for it? Anyone here at coursera or udacity etc on why there are no good math moocs?

I wish we had started with Spivak! Reading Rudin after 3 semesters of Stewart was a lot.

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