Friday, July 03, 2009
Writing a book!
For a long time, I wanted to write a book for beginners on Algebraic Topology, which was my first love in things academic. Now that I have retired for a few years, it seems to be good time to recall the elementary and nice topics which I still remember and indicate the flavour of the topics that fascinated me. It is coming back and apart from visualization of things in the small, what I still like is the power of general nonsense (my term for abstract thinking). But writing is a pain, too much latex symbols, diagrams going back and forth, changing the earlier chapters when progressing with the later chapters. It seems that it be a quite a mess. Once completed, it will be available online to see whether it will be useful to some. My experience with Rahul Banerjee's "Recovering the Lost Tongue: The Saga of Environmental Struggles in Central India" was that it was easier to read the published book than the online material. May be, it will be different with mathematics.
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7 comments:
Have fun! I suspect writing a good textbook is a very challenging task. Also, most books are written by active teachers, from their course notes. You probably have accumulated notes from over the years too, which should make it easier, especially if it is already in LaTeX.
Thanks. Unfortunately, all the notes I have are hand written. I did not pick up much of latex tying; collaborators were too kind. I am trying to come to grips with it now, I have to use as far as possible, free stuff since I do not have institutional attachments. The AMS version does not allow lateral arrows.
I think that with elementary books what matters is the BS part; informally explaining the concepts and techniques before jumping in to the details. Russians used to excel in this sort of writing. Since I still often think in Telugu, writing in English is not easy. In advanced books, one can dispense with some of this studd. Two of the best advanced writers I know, Milnor and Serre rarely waste words.
We will see how it goes. So far I have been enjoying it; it keeps me out of mischief.
Most mathematicians I know use latex anyway, institutional attachment or not. I don't think there is any proprietary program out there capable of handling advanced math. What do you mean by lateral arrows? The amssymb package should contain everything you need, including all kinds of arrows that I have never heard of...
i mean arrows in commutatative diagrams which are slanted, that is, neither vertical nor horizantal. i found a package today by PAUL TaYLOR:
www.paultaylor.eu/diagrams
which does it. So does XYpic, but it is supposed to be more complicated.
Standard LaTeX2e has simple slanted arrows (\swarrow, \nearrow, etc). But I don't know about double-headed, double-lined or other fancy stuff... The diagrams package looks like pretty esoteric stuff, but if you need to draw such diagrams, I'm sure you need that package :)
Thanks. I will find out from the people that I usually consult here as I go along.
Dear Swarup - best of luck with your book! I for one look forward to reading it.
Best,
Danny
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