Good German textbooks with English translation

[tiger2012]

I want to learn German to read those old classic papers written in German.

I think the best way is to find a good, classic German book and compare it with its English translation.

I believe in this way I can pick up German quickly.

So, could anyone recommend some good German books in maths or physics?

 

[fresh_42]

I want to learn German to read those old classic papers written in German.

I think the best way is to find a good, classic German book and compare it with its English translation.

I believe in this way I can pick up German quickly.

So, could anyone recommend some good German books in maths or physics?

You know, that this includes two translations, not just one? The way those old papers were written is dramatically different from how they are formulated today. I recently looked into the two original German papers of Emmy Noether's theorem and then in a modern English textbook. If I had told you it were two different subjects, you would have probably believed it. Another example (to me) was Einstein's GR paper from 1916 or Galois' original paper. Whereas Einstein looked at least familiar, although full of written text and not so much formulas, Galois' theory was hardly recognizable. I wonder if you shouldn't take an ordinary novel instead. The more as it will likely be mainly in a one-to-one translation and I doubt, that those original papers you referred to have been translated in a similar way.

 

[vanhees71]

Einstein's (as of the other old masters like Planck, Hertz, Helmholtz, Pauli,...) papers are just marvelous prose. I don't think that you can find many better written physics papers in German at all.

Sommerfeld's "Lectures on theoretical physics" (6vols.) are master pieces, and the English translation is very much the same as the German original. The same holds for Landau and Lifshitz. What might be very helpful is a bilungual edition of the Feynman lectures in English and German side by side. I'm not sure whether this is still in print.