I love this preface to a "Brief" on Tensor Analysis.

[NNadir]

I sent my youngest boy off to college this week and of course, it brought back my own youth, even as I find myself living vicariously in his.

Recently I collected some books on Tensor Analysis to give him to read in his spare time - ha! as if he'll have any - and I just loved to death these opening lines from the Preface:

When I was an undergraduate, working as a co-op student at North American Aviation, I tried to learn something about tensors. In the Aeronautical Engineering Department at MIT, I had just finished an introductory course in classical mechanics that so impressed me that to this day I cannot watch plane in flight-especially in a turn-without imaging it bristling with vectors. Near the end of the course the professor showed that, if an airplane is treated as a rigid body, there arises a mysterious collection of rather simple looking integrals called the components of the moment of inertia tensor. Tensor-what power those two syllables seemed to resonate. I had heard the word once before, in an aside by a graduate instructor to the cognoscenti in the front row of a course in strength of materials. "What the book calls stresses is actually a tensor..."

With my interest twice piqued and with time off from fighting the brush fires of a demanding curriculum, I was ready for my first serious effort at self-instruction. In Los Angeles, after several tries, I found a store with a book on tensor analysis. In my mind I had rehearsed the scene in which a graduate student or professor, spying me there, would shout, "You're an undergraduate. What are you doing looking at a book on tensors?" But luck was mine: the book had a plain brown dust jacket. Alone in my room, I turned immediately to the definition of a tensor: "A 2nd order tensor is a collection of n2 objects that transform according to the rule... “and thence followed an inscrutable collection of superscripts, subscripts, over bars, and partial derivatives. A pedagogical disaster! Where was the connection with those beautiful, simple, boldfaced symbols, those arrows that I could visualize so well? I was not to find out until after graduate school. But it is my hope that, with this book, you, as an undergraduate, may sail beyond that bar on which I once foundered…

Been there, done that.

I wish my boy the same.

James G. Simmons: A Brief on Tensor Analysis

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. That looks like a lovely book. You are very fortunate, good luck to your son!

[NNadir]

3. Oh it is, the first chapter has a wonderful quote from Einstein.

The magic of this theory will hardly fail to impose itself on anybody who has truly understood it; it represents a genuine triumph of the method of absolute differential calculus founded by Gauss, Riemann, Christoffel, Ricci and Leoi-Cioita.

When my son was in elementary school they had a wonderful quote from Einstein on a poster in the music department of all places.

It went like this:

"If you think you have problems with math, I assure you mine are much worse!"

[lapfog_1]

2. Sounds similar to Strunk and White's Element of Style"

possibly the best book about writing that has ever been penned.

[NNadir]

4. I have that book somewhere on a shelf somewhere. I confess I haven't opened though, in...

...several decades.

I'll have to look for it.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. Ah, Springer Verlag ... and their (in)famous "Yellow Peril" series ...

as that nickname suggests, the author of that preface wasn't the only one to founder.

(I kind of wish he had specified what textbook that classical mechanics course used ... though at MIT it could well have been the professor's notes.)

For books in chemistry, it doesn't seem to matter to me who wrote it -- the material comes so naturally to me it just doesn't seem to take much effort to understand it. But the farther I get outside my area of expertise, the more sensitive I am to style in writing and presentation, and the greater distinction I feel between "well-written" and "poorly-written" books (arbitrarily defined as those which I readily, or only with difficulty, understand). Some math books I absorb and even enjoy, others I never quite begin digesting. Computer programming is my Achilles heel -- there just seems to be a gap between easy books that don't cover much more than basics I already know, and books where the uphill climb is just too steep to handle. I'm afraid Joel Spolsky may be right -- there are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand pointers and indirection, and those who don't. I seem to be one for whom the usage of pointers just never seems to crystallize, no matter the author.

[getting old in mke]

6. Man, I'd forgotten Springer-Verlag

only used them for the math topics. Talk about "a box full of chocolates--you never know what you'll get"!

Re: computers: Best course I even took was a compiler construction course, back in about '82-3, shortly after I'd sold out as a math grad student and started earning money slinging code. In it, of course, the on-going exercise was writing our own compiler matching a give spec.

While I learned a lot about the topic at hand, I learned even more about programming and data structures. I thought I was good before, and generally was, but creating code that created code that would itself run, coming up with ways to represent it, and be efficient, really made me see things in a much more atomic way. At that point, pointers and indirection ceased to have any more mystery and instead seemed essential.

So, write a compiler...

Or, if you don't have that spare time, be happy with knowing you understand 1+1=10.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. That is ... interesting ... advice. I might give it a shot sometime.

I wondered why on Earth Kernighan & Ritchie (or was it Kernighan & Pike ?) chose as an "introductory example" a calculator compiler, rather than just a calculator. Maybe not as goofy as I thought. (K&R is not really aimed at beginners, but at experienced programmers who just don't know C ... not so helpful to someone who wants to start out with C for a first language, but I didn't realize that when I picked it up. As someone explained years later, K&R is a definition, not a tutorial.)

For now, I'm trying out Rexx.

[NNadir]

8. In the electronic age, Springer is one of the most generous and open publishers. Love 'em.

I never heard those books referred to as "yellow peril."

I loved them; seldom bought any - bought a few including a very nice book on combinatorics - but loved them anyway.

This tensor book looks beautiful, and I hope my son goes there.

Twenty years ago, Princeton had a real university book store and an absolutely vast mathematics section and - something one sees almost nowhere - a very large section of chemistry monographs. The math section looked like it was filled with yellow stripes. Springer ruled it.

Now of course, all university bookstores have been outsourced, most to - ugh! - Barnes and Noble. Math section? A joke!

One of the things about a Barnes and Noble is that the astrology/religion section is larger by orders of magnitude than the chemistry section and math sections combined, and always twice as large as the physics section, which focuses on books with "Einstein" and "Hawking" in the title . One is lucky if one can browse and find three chemistry monographs in these stores, and one is almost always the Dover version of Pauling's General Chemistry.

The destruction of independent university bookstores is a great tragedy, I think.

Princeton at least outsourced to an independent bookstore, although it too has a vastly withered chemistry monograph section.

(My boy asked for one of these Dover Pauling's General Chemistry for a graduation gift from high school. I offered him my hard copy, but he wanted his own. Great kid! He actually has all the chemistry courses he'll need for his degree from his high school AP, although materials science engineering is a kind of chemistry, solid state anyway, but I'm also hoping he'll choose a chemical engineering course for a double major, since he's entering college as a sophomore. His mother wants him to do two minors, French and economics, sigh...)

[eppur_se_muova]

9. Sad to hear about Princeton's bookstore.

I had to check on MIT's Tech Coop -- it now has two branches, and being independent (it was originally founded as a student co-op; membership is still $1/yr) I hope has avoided the desubstantiation evident elsewhere. Of course The Coop is not MIT's alone, it partners with Harvard, and maybe other schools now, for all I know. They even had a used chemistry book section, with volumes from AP, Elsevier, etc.

The Pitt Bookstore actually changed its name to The Pitt Store, now appears to emphasize clothing with the Pitt logo and colors (i.e. the "team's" colors). It was a pretty nice place, with professional books in chemistry and other sciences, including a lot from Springer in the math section. (Sadly, I couldn't afford many "extra" books back then, so I never really took advantage. ) Their "thing" used to be that they carried a huge selection of large picture calendars, which brought in a lot of non-University customers and dollars. I think I preferred that to the rah-rah appeal to boosters.

[NNadir]

10. I'm up in Boston quite often; when I get away I use MIT's library which has a few open...

...access computers.

I never actually looked for their bookstore; I assumed like everywhere else it had been BN'd.

As they have a nuclear engineering school in the MIT, one can get all the nuclear journals in the library, including the ANS journals. So, being a journal pig, I seldom spend an hour of free time in the GB area anywhere else.

My son's university has ANS journals, but no nuclear engineering school. Sigh...

I'll take a look at their bookstore if I can find it. I assume it must be in the student center off Massachusetts Ave.

Thanks.

[eppur_se_muova]

11. Just bear in mind I haven't been there myself in nearly four decades. :)

But yes, it seems it's still in the basement of the Student Center, with another branch in Kendall Square. If I had to guess, I would guess that one's oriented to 6.3's (i.e. Computer Science majors). I was a student there when personal computers were just barely getting started, so I'm sure a *lot* of things are very different.

I used to love going through the old journals in the library basement, and browsing the stacks in Chemistry. Learned a lot outside of coursework there. Ah, gnurd nostalgia !