Customer Reviews

Geometric Transformations II (New Mathematical Library) (Bk. 2)

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I'm taking a course on competitive problem solving at a local college for high school students. We are starting out by going through the series of geometric transformations by Yaglom. The lessons are quite easy to understand and the problems are very good. I started the books without a clue on how to start the problems and now I can solve pretty much all of them... so the book must be doing its job pretty well.

The book uses only basic notions to show the power of simple geometric transformations. Theorems (some simple, some not so obvious) are demonstrated by means of rotation, reflexion, stretching, in a very elegant way.
Can be enjoyed from High school level up.
With Geometric Transformations I it is a masterpiece of elegance, split into two books.

The Yaglom geometric transformation books are aimed at a mathematical Olympiad audience. The books are not primarily about transformations, they are mainly about how to use transformations to solve problems. Yaglom wrote the book in Russian back in the fifties, presenting geometrical transformations techniques to geometric problem solving. He introduces transformation types and then shows how they can be used to solve problems that otherwise would sometimes be almost unsolvable using elementary (synthetic) methods. Then he presents a set of problems that vary from difficult to fiendish. Full solutions are provided, you will need them. The Russian book has chapters on congruence, similarity and projective transformations that are contained in the three English translations published by the MAA. It continues with sections on inversion transformations that are not (yet?) translated into English.

This is the second of three books, it deals with similarity transformations.

These are great books for problem solving.