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Comment by BossingAround | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 to anything we had or have in the West.

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 young children.

Can you give me some examples of good East German higher math or physics books? I'd like to have another go at it.

Unfortunately I wasn't really that interested in math when I was a student, I just remembered the ranting of my math teacher. I think you can still get quite a few on Ebay but I fear that not much has been digitized. I can recommend a few Soviet works however that are more introductory level and that I have worked with myself.

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.

Actually my view is the opposite. Older math books has a lot of practical examples.

It seems like in the 90s and 2000s a lot of math books started being written by pure mathematicians who don't care about the applications of mathematics.

My understanding is that in the 90s and 2000s publishers started realizing that they could sell bare bones textbooks and then sell those problem examples in compendiums, effectively double dipping on each student.

Edit: For example, books like this: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Gregory-Grant/dp/B08FP7SNZJ

> In addition to well-explained solutions, this manual includes corrections and clarifications to the classic textbook Linear Algebra, second edition, by Kenneth Hoffman and Ray Kunze.

I think this is actually fair; even Strang, after all, provides answers to only select problem sets (e.g. only odd problem sets in Linear Algebra if I recall correctly) though to be fair to Strang, it seems to me that in his case, it's more a matter of "if you are unsure, come and ask me" and probably not the case of maximizing profits.

This so much but in mechanical engineering. I was struggling in my course when I happened on a book written in 1980s in used book store for $1

It had worked examples, basic theory from foundation up, and was absent all superfluous info.

I credit it to passing my course and getting to where I am today. I still have it in my office to this day.

Why would you say that? The kind of mathematics that book presents has barely changed in the last 200 years. I would doubt there's much difference to speak of at all.

Because while the field of mathematics has probably not changed, the field of didactics has changed drastically, and the student expectations in 1980s and 2021 will be also drastically different.

Has it actually improved though? Every study I've seen says students are worse at maths today than 30 years ago, so to me it doesn't look like all that pedagogy research improved things. If things actually got better we should have strong evidence supporting that. Images are prettier, sure, but do students who study using modern books actually understand the material better after the course is done?

I think attention spans have shortened (which is arguably devastating for maths), and the materials considered "state of the art in modern pedagogy" are the ones that take that into account in ways that a book from 1987 does not.

Like food and architecture, math pedagogy has been affected by the progressive diseases of modern civilization, so new often does not mean good.

As someone who had a hard time focusing in school, modern books with lots of text actually made it harder to focus than books with less text and more information per word. I can read 20 words and then think about those, I can't read the same information if it is spread out and hidden within a 2000 words text.

So maybe kids has problems focusing partially due to modern pedagogy? Every word you write down has a cost to the reader, and the less attention span the reader has the more that cost matters. Drown them in too many words and they will just zone out since their attention span didn't last long enough for them to reach the important parts of the text.

Drill exercises require very little attention time but are the keybto learning a topic and understanding it. This is nothing new but it is usually despised because “boring”…

Not so much with respect to Maths: either you integrate volumes or you do not, and the theory is essentially “dumb”.

As long as you know what a derivative is, all integral and vector calculus is just a comination of “look at the problem with an infinite loupe and then add all those values “.

DiffEq is more or less similar.

Classical maths was very well taught: examples and applications galore.

Most modern textbooks I used in university are complete garbage. A lot of concept vomiting without intuition building or real world insight.

I doubt math professors who write textbooks that are not meant for the mass public (i.e. not part of a state mandated curriculum) follow the field of didactics.

I've read math textbooks from the 60s onwards. I do not see a trend vs time.

Maybe just open it and have a look?

The text covers a lot of ground very quickly omitting a lot of "pure math" details.

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

Gelfand's books are good too.

Classical books are usually much more engineering oriented than modern ones, with many more applications.

The thing is that most applications are just ordinary things: tou are not going to go much deeper than angular momentum and/or the Stoked-Gauss theorem for electric-magnetic fields.

"Higher math" is a very broad concept now, you would need thousands of pages to cover it. This books is basically calculus with applications written in an accessible way by known experts and without confusing mistakes.

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