Mathematische Schülerbücherei some questions

[pier4r]

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematis...3%BCcherei

A list of books about mathematics (ranging from high school to recreational mathematics to helpful advices and some undergraduate math) in German, printed in the old DDR (wait in English it is GDR right?).

Some questions.

- For the German speakers in the forum: do you know the series? Where can I get those? I am not sure where the StaBi in Berlin has those, being those produced in the DDR.
Ebay classifieds (kleinanzeigen) unlikely has this because those are niche things (although I may give it a try)

- Then the question can be expanded, is there a similar series in English? (I am not aware of anything similar in Italian, that is also a language I can chew)

[grsbanks]

(10-09-2020 04:29 PM)pier4r Wrote:  ....printed in the old DDR (wait in English it is GDR right?).

Not Walter but yes. Deutsche Demokratische Republik == German Democratic Republic.

Funny how a state that has "People's" or "Democratic" in its name is anything but...

[Albert Chan]

Hi, pier4r

If you considered Mathematical Olympiad problems "recreational", this is a great site.

https://mathematicalolympiads.wordpress.com/

[pier4r]

Yes the math olimpiad are really nice but also not that recreational (one needs to sweat a bit, unless one is good/not rusty).

See also: https://artofproblemsolving.com/community/c13_contests

Only I was thinking about a series (be it books or magazines).

The closer I can recall is:
- eureka https://www.archim.org.uk/eureka/archive/ (they didn't have the archive in early 2019!)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of...athematics no idea how to get this. It is a pity that so much work is done (digital or analog) and then lost.
- http://rmm.ludus-opuscula.org/Home/WebPa...About%20us
- others? No idea

Those are neat, but having a sort of "relaxed" collection as mentioned in the wiki of Mathematische Schulbücherei would be interesting. I am pretty sure something should exists.

edit: of course there is brilliant.org (and maybe similar sites that I do not know). The problem with brilliat.org is that they have a lot of problems but the new ones bury the old ones and it is difficult to dig archives there. They do not even publish books with collections of problems (something they could well do). In other works they have and hoard nice problems, but they give back only a little. Likely they do not see the treasure they have.

[John Keith]

There is also Project Euler. Mostly math problems meant to be solved by computer programming.

[Felix Gross]

The Mathematische Schülerbücherei covered a very wide range of math subjects. Some of the books are aimed as high school students, some are at advanced university level.

Some of the books were re-published by the West-German Harri Deutsch or by Teubner. Those might have had a higher circulation.

Some of the books (e.g. the ones by Lietzmann) can be bought at springer.com. For second hand books I generally recommend eurobuch.com being a meta search engine covering abebooks, amazon, zvab, eBay etc. Usually I find there what I am looking for.

I have some of those books (Lietzmann, Belkner) which I like. Generally the textbooks published in East Germany were very thorough and rigorous. Very little color and sometimes very bad paper quality though. The latter should be considered when buying second hand. Better stick to "good" and better.

Felix

[Karl-Ludwig Butte]

Hi pier4r,

it seems there is no single web presence which has the complete original book series available. I have found the following:

- The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (http://www.dnb.de) lists book #1 in an edition of 2001 (see here). So maybe there are modern edition from other books of the original series.

- The "Zentrales Verzeichnis Antiquarischer Buecher" ZVAB.com has book #76 for sale (see here). Maybe they have other books, too.

- The libraries of the universities of the former GDR may have some of them (e.g. University of Rostock).

- And of course TAS may have one or the other book of the series.

Best regards

Karl

[pier4r]

Thanks for the pointers!

I got one that is "gut gedacht ist halb gelöst" (think well is half of the problem ???) from a book box with a label "zu verschenken". The quality didn't seem so bad (maybe the book was always closed though).

For project euler, I know that too yes, although it goes in the direction of the international math olympiad (at least from a certain problem on).


About the book from 2001. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Pavel-S-Alexa...3817116586 122 € wow. I was thinking they were "cheap" as people see them as old. (ah found the same book for 8 € )

I was thinking like this: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Reinhard-Krieg/dp/B002OS2LIU (2 € , nr 86 of the series)

[SlideRule]

Printed only, or electronic?

[attachment=8789] [attachment=8790] [attachment=8791] [attachment=8792]

BEST!
SlideRule

[Martin Hepperle]

plenty of these here, typically around 5€:
https://www.booklooker.de/B%C3%BCcher/An...3%BCcherei

[pier4r]

(10-10-2020 12:02 PM)SlideRule Wrote:  Printed only, or electronic?



BEST!
SlideRule

Electronic too, but where do you get them in electronic format?

[joeres]

Unfortunately, I can't remember on the book series "Mathematical Student Library".

At the time, however, I always enjoyed reading the math school magazine "alpha". At https://mathematikalpha.de/alpha, Mr. Polster has made the magazine available as PDF files. Even his math program got the name "alpha" from this magazine.

He also made books, other magazines and texts available as PDF from that time:
- Math problems: https://mathematikalpha.de/mathematikaufgaben
- Mathematics booklet "Unterhaltsames Mathe-ABC": https://mathematikalpha.de/lvz-mathematikhefte
- Mathematics school books: https://mathematikalpha.de/mathematikschulbuecher
- Mathematics books: https://mathematikalpha.de/mathematikbuecher
- Math texts etc .: https://mathematikalpha.de/weitere-mathematiktexte

I can still remember a lot of it (e.g. the book "Der Señor und die Punkte" and "Über Zahlen und Überzahlen") very well. For me one of the most interesting sites on the net. Maybe it will help.

Regards
Joerg

[pier4r]

Great! thanks!

PS: interesting how a community in a language, even if very large, doesn't have always the equivalent of another community that is smaller (see here German vs English or even the activity on Tiplanet (french) vs other calc forums).

[pier4r]

To add some more sources of recreational math (I do not remember if there is already a thread on this, there may be. Could be that I opened one myself)

- problem of the week from the purdue university.
- https://www.math.purdue.edu/pow/archive
- https://www.math.purdue.edu/pow

[joeres]

Under https://mathematikalpha.de/schuelerbuecherei, Mr. Polster started to publish a first part of the "Mathematische Schülerbücherei" books as a PDF scan or as a latex PDF-copy. Really great man. Have fun while reading.

greetings
Joerg

[Felix Gross]

That site is awesome for a number of reasons, even calculator related reasons.

One is that it contains PDF Files for a math encyclopedia (in German, https://mathematikalpha.de/lexikon ) which I still find very useful. I have a pdf file of this on my smartphone. The book gives you not only the equations but also examples and lot of graphs to learn or re-learn some higher math material fast. The color scheme is a bit intense but actually rather logical. The "how to use a slide rule" is bonus material... The book originated in the sixties.

The book was published in English as "The VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics" which you can find on the net. I remember a glowing review of this in the PPC Journal and to my knowledge EduCalc sold it.

Mr. Polster does care about the copyrights of the authors. So the material he publishes is legal. He took the pains to ask the rights holders and in almost all cases he got it.

The site offers complete math, chemistry, physics and astronomy (!) high school texts from former East Germany. The content gets quite advanced when you check out the grade 12 books, the last year of East German high school. They introduced calculators formally into the text much earlier than in my part of then West Germany. Also interesting to compare with today's' math texts which adhere to very different paradigm. No idea if that is good or bad, but it is different.

Even if your German is minimal or non-existent, you will catch the drift when you look at those books

Felix

[pier4r]

(12-15-2020 09:56 PM)joeres Wrote:  Under https://mathematikalpha.de/schuelerbuecherei, Mr. Polster started to publish a first part of the "Mathematische Schülerbücherei" books as a PDF scan or as a latex PDF-copy. Really great man. Have fun while reading.

greetings
Joerg

Awesome!

[Archilog]

(12-15-2020 09:56 PM)joeres Wrote:  Under https://mathematikalpha.de/schuelerbuecherei, Mr. Polster started to publish a first part of the "Mathematische Schülerbücherei" books as a PDF scan or as a latex PDF-copy. Really great man. Have fun while reading.

greetings
Joerg

Vielen Dank, Jörg.

[pier4r]

I wanted to add another "math recreations" magazine/periodical that I recently noted: https://chalkdustmagazine.com/

[pier4r]

Recently I noticed that the Brilliant.org community was closed. The community there posted (and discussed) math problems at high rate. Sure the Signal to noise ratio wasn't always that great, but still there were interesting tidbits.

The entire copy of it can be found in a link here: https://brilliant.org/community-faq/ (9.1gb compressed, 18.9gb uncompressed)