While new books are necessarily the focus of any book review column,
it is heartening to note that several publishers have started series
which reprint great classics from the past. Oxford's Classic
Texts in the Physical Sciences are handsome large-size
paperback reprints of some truly fabulous books. The current list
(see below) includes books on physics (usually very mathematical
physics) and on mathematics, all of them quite well known. The text
seems to have been photographically reproduced from older printings,
so that one can admire the old-fashioned typography as well as the
mathematical and physical content. If your library does not have
copies of the original editions, you should certainly ask them to
consider getting these... and you may want one or two for yourself!Theory of Probability, by Sir Harold Jeffreys, Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences, Oxford, 1998, $29.95.
The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes, by S. Chandrasekhar, Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences, Oxford, 1998, $29.95.
Dynamical Theory of Crystal Lattices, by Max Born and Kun Huang, Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences, Oxford, 1998, $29.95.
Algebraic Projective Geometry, by J. G. Semple and G. T. Kneebone, Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences, Oxford, 1998, $29.95.
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, volumes one and two, by James Clerk Maxwell, Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences, Oxford, 1998, $29.95 each.
A recent batch of books from SIAM
(Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) includes several
interesting monographs. Topics in Intersection Graph Theory,
by Terry A. McKee and F. R. McMorris, is a very nice survey of the
topic with a large bibliography at the end. Introduction to
Matrix Analytic Methods in Stochastic Modeling, by G. Latouche
and V. Ramaswami, and Iterative Methods for Optimization, by
C. T. Kelley, are both somewhat over my head but look like good
surveys of their subjects, written in the terse style that seems now
to be de rigueur for advanced texts. All three books are
quite technical and require careful participatory reading.
My main reaction to them is to be impressed by the truly wide range
of material that fits into "applied mathematics". One need only show
one of these books to reluctant undergraduates to make it clear that
applied mathematicians do indeed make serious use of all that theory
we teach them.Topics in Intersection Graph Theory, by Terry A. McKee and F. R. McMorris, SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications, SIAM, 1999, $55.00.
Introduction to Matrix Analytic Methods in Stochastic Modeling, by G. Latouche and V. Ramaswami, ASA-SIAM Series on Statistics and Applied Probability, ASA and SIAM, 1999, $49.50.
Iterative Methods for Optimization, by C. T. Kelley, Frontiers in Applied Mathematics, vol 18. SIAM, 1999, $37.00.
Wiley Interscience has its own series of classic texts; these are
called the Wiley Classics Library. This series has been
running much longer and includes a large number of titles. The range
is quite wide, running from Courant's classic calculus text to such
standard reference volumes as Dunford and Schwartz on Linear
Operators, Curtis and Reiner on Representation Theory (both of their
books), and Siegel's three volume Topics in Function
Theory. Many of the books are mathematical, but statistics and
physics are also represented. Again, libraries should take note. The
latest addition to the list is The Analysis of Variance, by
Henry Scheffé, which my statistician friends tell me is
indeed a classic. The Analysis of Variance, by Henry Scheffé, Wiley Classics Library, Wiley Interscience, 1999, $49.95.
From Springer comes the Classics in Mathematics series, which ranges from famous textbooks such as the Introduction to Calculus and Analysis by R. Courant and F. John, and Problems and Theorems in Analysis, by G. Pólya and G. Szegö, to more specialized monographs such as André Weil's Elliptic Functions According to Eisensteing and Kronecker'
From Princeton we have the Princeton Landmarks in Mathematics, which include interesting books by Hermann Weyl, John Milnor, Abraham Robinson, and others.
One should be grateful for all this. In these days when books seem to go out of print very quickly, it is a Good Thing that so many mathematics publishers are bringing valuable old books back into print.