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Title: A Treatise on Plane and Advanced Trigonometry (Phoenix Edition)
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Manufacturer: Dover Publications
List Price: $57.50
Our Price: $32.24
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| Customer Reviews: |
| A Treatise on Plane and Advanced Trigonometry (Phoenix Edition) by Dover Publications Another gem in this book |
To add to the gems mentioned in Michael Hardy's review, Hobson's
book also contains an extension of Ptolemy's theorem to a
general quadrilateral. This extension is an identity, not an
inequality as given in many other places as the extension of
Ptolemy's theorem. |
| A Treatise on Plane and Advanced Trigonometry (Phoenix Edition) by Dover Publications Not really a textbook |
I feel I have to write this just to answer the previous
reviewer's assertion that there's nothing here that's not
in a modern textbook. Perhaps there's nothing here that's
not in any modern treatise on this subject written for an
audience of mathematicians, if such a book exists. But a
textbook is different from a treatise readable by
mathematicians. The latter is what this is. The table on
page 74 is amazing, and I challenge anyone to find it in a
textbook. It expresses the sine of each multiple of 3 degrees
in terms of rational numbers and square roots---expressions
involving nested radicals and fractions. Few if any textbooks
on trigonmetry would contain Euler's infinite product
expansion, found here near the top of page 128. Later there
is a whole chapter on infinite products. There is also a
proof of the irrationality of pi, using continued fractions.
Definitely it's too dense to be a textbook (but maybe an
exceptionally bright student could use it to learn this
material for the first time). |
| A Treatise on Plane and Advanced Trigonometry (Phoenix Edition) by Dover Publications Nothing remarkable... |
This Dover hardbound reprint of a 1928 trig text is useful mainly as an item of historical interest. It presents terse derivations of most of the standard trig relationships. There's really nothing here that you couldn't find in a modern textbook.
In addition the book was typeset to be compact rather than readable -- dense paragraphs of mixed text and equations. This density, coupled with the tiny type size used throughout the volume, makes this book painful to read for any length of time.
I'm glad Dover is finally producing more durable hardcover versions of out-of-print math books, but given the content and the price, I don't think Hobson's trig text should have been included in the Phoenix series of titles.
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