Customer Reviews

A Source Book in Mathematics (Dover Books on Mathematics)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For students of the history of maths, Smith provides you with a very convenient reference. He has gone back to many of the original papers by Newton, Pascal and others, and gathered 125 of these into this book. You can search for insight into how those luminaries made their important discoveries. As an added utility, the papers have been translated into English.

An amazing time saver. For he lets you access the papers without any intermediary. The alternative would be to spend months searching in some large research library. And also probably having to order copies made from other libraries. At non-trivial cost in time and money.

The footnotes contained in the book are very helpful. I bought this book some few years ago and stiff look upon the pages for referencing and clarification.

Mathematics was never easy and looking at these classic
reproductions you really get a feel of the ignorance
of even the greatest men in mathematics.
Here you can see them struggle to invent new ideas
that made possible our scientific and technical culture.
I think this kind of book is invaluable to the student
who wishes to actually understand.
Some of the papers are almost impossibly difficult.
It is a very good book!