Classic maths books reset with LaTeX on Project Gutenberg

The other day while reading about the growing discontent with the price of subscriptions and remembering the similar problem with the price of student text the only thing I could think about was that few of today's texts are better than the classic mathematical texts. I've a small shelf of books published by Chelsea with names on them like Hilbert, Abel, Gauss and others who pretty much established the base line of modern mathematics. That Project Gutenberg is on course to provide the same books and more is some of the best news I've heard as a solution to the problem. The only down side I can think of is that these books have a fairly steep learning curve since they depend on a much better previous education than we do today. That however is a fixable problem as well. This is good news indeed! Here is the link: http://www.ams.org/bookstore/chelsealist

EDIT: added URL and expanded name list.

Wow. Nice. LaTeX typesetting for math just can't be beat.

How can one get involved? Re-typesetting a math book sounds like a good way to learn something...

> The only down side ... steep learning curve since depend previous education > That however is a fixable problem as well.

@hsmyers I think I have the fix. I am writing a book on basic math. I have had good progress coming up with a //modern// introduction to high school math, calculus and linear algebra, but I was worried whether I will be able to teach the more advanced stuff -- now I can let Gauss take care of that ;)

A very funny / concise calculus book: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283 quote from the intro: "Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics—and they are mostly clever fools—seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way."

The server crashed due to HN coverage: https://twitter.com/#!/aperiodical/status/195557677680689152

"the server has crashed after having HackerNews pointed at it. Trying to get it rebooted now, and then we'll enable caching! #toosuccessful"

Also, no search engines seem to have cached it.

EDIT: Blog linked to http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Mathematics_%28Bookshelf%29 .

This is very exciting. First, Gutenberg gets some basic typography. Second, it's one hell of a showcase for LaTeX. Third, I nearly cried when I saw GH Hardy's book in its new LaTeX form. The diagrams alone.

Oh, and there's LaTeX source for each one! Glorious!

I noticed this book: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13693/13693-pdf.pdf, perhaps others, are missing a table of contents but compiling the tex source does give me one; it has probably only been compiled in one pass.

Some of this stuff is pretty hard. Allow me to recommend something that HN readers should be able to enjoy: Flatland (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/201) is a highly readable introduction to higher-dimensional spaces.

Please don't forget to donate a few bucks to this amazing project!

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Project_Gutenberg_Ne...

MetaLibri is another free site which uses TeX to typeset classical texts, among them The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.

http://metalibri.wikidot.com/titles

I like the fact that PDF margins are (intentionally, or not) eReaders-optimized. PDFs with wide margins are annoying on Kindle, which does not remove unnecessary whitespace from them, thus forcing user to read pages 'on side' or zoom parts of the document.

I now a decent amount of TeX but want to learn more, anyone have a nice advanced example TeX file for laying out large books, docs?

I love resources like this. Publicly available knowledge, especially on a topic like Math is absolutely priceless. I commend whoever took the time to put this together.

I'm just incredibly happy with the books they already have on the history of mathematics. When I got my BS in math, the history bits always fascinated me but I never took the time to dig into them with the fervor I'd have liked. Thanks for this!

Often the different notation from older books makes them harder to learn from, but sometimes I've found them useful. (Watson's "A Treatise on the Theory of Bessel Functions" was the only place I could find certain formulas derived.)

Link is down