Customer Reviews

Test Masters for Geometry

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Jacobs is a great teacher and he has written a book that contains much of the essence of that teaching. He presents the material well, with entertaining hooks and careful exposition. There's a good mix of approaches (transformational, intuitive, and rigorous) and a good mix of problems (easy, medium, hard, a few really hard). It's the best balanced of all the geometry texts I've seen. The one drawback is that it doesn't respond to modern trends of using more discovery-based inductive approaches, or using tools like Geometer's Sketchpad or Cabri. Michael Serra's _Discovering Geometry_ is a good source of problems and activities if you wish to supplement your course with this sort of thing.

I really enjoyed reading this text. This book is very sensitive to students who are encountering proof for the first time. Jacobs does a great job in building the subject. His motivations and also the humor in text is what makes this book so enjoyable to read. What's more amazing is that he still maintains all the rigor that is critical for advance studies in mathematics.

A very clear, very entertaining textbook for a high-school course on geometry.

This book introduces logical proofs right at the beginning; you may have some difficulty convincing your kids or yourself that you need to work out all these silly logic puzzles in order to begin studying geometry, but you do.

From there on, the book is a sheer joy to read, full of interesting and tricky problems, clear explanations, and of course those famous B.C. and Peanuts clips.

A good geometry book for high school students. It teaches everything one needs to know about basic euclidean geometry with intuitive lessons and clear explinations of all the content. One thing to note though is that you need a strong understanding of the algerbraic principals of equality, and the fact that the teachers edition is very hard to come by.

As the other reviews show...this book is not only lucid and brilliant, but quite accessible. I've taught classes with it starting in Jr. High with gifted youngsters and with homeschoolers starting in the 6th grade.
I regularly recommend this book to homeschool moms because it is not intimidating, and they invariably enjoy it.
Also, this is PURE geometry, untainted by algebra. Probably the first and only time most students have to learn logic and the structure of argument.
A no brainer. This is the best geometry book I've ever seen, hands down.

I have no experience with other geometry books--although I did use the Schaum book and other "outline" help books early in the school year as a reference. Actually Jacobs was easier to use than the "outline" help books. Many problems skate close to calculus (limits are introduced) and analytic geometry. Some problems are quite nearly elegant. Highly recommended.

This is the second book on geometry which I have read almost cover to cover. The first was Geometry by Ray Jurgensen and Richard G Brown written in 2000. Each of these texts seem to me to provide a good introduction to the basics of geometry. I suspect, even someone at the college level, can learn some items which could be quite useful for math, science, or engineering courses. The author has a wonderful sense of humor, which he springles over the text. I have not read the most recent edition of this book, but I hope to one day. This last edition is 17 years younger, having been published in 2004, instead of 1987.

I picked up this book just as a supplement before my freshman year in high school, and it ended up leading my entire geometry honors education, way ahead of my teacher and my school-assigned textbook. In the last 7 years, I have not had a textbook that teaches math in such a logical, clear, and light-hearted way, while maintaining the discipline and rigor of a formal mathematics training.

I am now a senior in college, and have taken several rigorous mathematics courses in Analysis, Multivariate Calculus, and Linear Algebra, and the experience of self-studying from this textbook still stays with me. Before I learned from this book, I thought I was completely unskilled and incompetent at math, and quite frankly, math scared me. I realized later that student achievement in math is highly dependent on both a great textbook and great instruction, and not some mystical "math gene". I want to thank Harold R. Jacobs for writing math the way it should be done; if math were taught like this in all our public schools, it would truly revolutionize U.S. education in math and science. It puts an important emphasis at understanding the basics of proofs and geometry, to the point where you can relate it to logical phenomenons in your everyday life... to a point where it becomes second nature and just not another theory to memorize. This is a very Eastern method of math education, prevalent in Chinese and Russian classrooms, which may be what U.S. education reform needs. It is an incredibly powerful way to educate math. When the fundamentals are mastered at a deep level, the book challenges you to a wide variety of problems, which instead of being daunting (which is the norm for a math course), they are incredibly satisfying to solve. This book actually teaches thinking and logic, not just material.

AS A COMPARISON TEXTBOOK: Geometry for Enjoyment and Challenge by Richard Rhoad, George Milauskas and Robert Whipple was the was assigned for my geometry honors class, and it is incomparable to Harold's book. Geometry for Enjoyment used proofs that were incredibly circuitous that I often wondered if the authors purposely lengthened the lines of their proofs just to add more pages to their book. My dad (a former math professor) and I caught a couple logical errors or typos in Geometry for Enjoyment that should not have been made by the authors. 3 weeks into my Geometry Honors class I stopped even looking at their solutions to geometry proofs, because once they reached proofs of moderate or advanced level, 90% of the time the steps were roundabout and overdone, to the point of illogical. Instead, I would reference Jacobs's textbook for proofs to similar problems.

The same proof in Jacobs's textbook took half the amount of steps, and used the most logical and powerful path, which really are quite beautiful in comparison to the textbook the high school assigned to me. Occams razor exists as profound philosophy in science & math for a reason, and Jacobs embodies that!


Another great thing about Harold's textbook is that it has very light-hearted and entertaining application problems. One segment that I love is in the beginning, there is an illustration of the Mad Hatter and his friends having tea with Alice, commenting on how it's an incredible logical fallacy "to say what you mean" with "to mean with you say." I've forgotten the entire quote, but it was very entertaining. Most high school math textbooks have application problems about climbing ladders and filling concrete in some giant cylindrical container, or some other oversimplified version of an industrial building project. What high school-er finds that fun?? I would much rather solve problems about Euclid in comic-form or of Alice venturing in wonderland. Basic geometry is incredibly abstract, so it only makes sense to apply it in a profoundly simple and fantastic setting.


If I ever teach geometry in the future, this is my textbook of choice! The best for self-study and classroom education!

Very good book for high school level geometry. Concepts are broken down into well organized and small lessons, that way not too much is introduced at one time.
Easy to read, easy to follow, and even entertaining at times.