Klein's Encyclopedia: Is an English Translation Possible?

[jonjacson]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein's_Encyclopedia_of_Mathematical_Sciences

Originals are in German or French, the Japanese version cut all the historical content :(

Do you think that some day we will see this published in English?

Size is big, 20k pages, but it cannot be more interesting I think.

 

[fresh_42]

I had a look at it. The originals are publically available. A list of links is e.g.
https://de.zxc.wiki/wiki/Encyklopädie_der_mathematischen_Wissenschaften#Digitalisierte_Ausgabe

It is indeed an interesting read because they spent a lot of effort citing every original reference of all the statements. So it is historically marvelous. Whether it is of scientific interest is a different question. Mathematical textbooks can be divided into a pre-Bourbaki and a post-Bourbaki era. This means that mathematics is written in a different way and we are usually accustomed to the post-B. style. This means in return that it is not automatically easy to read texts from before. The main difference is, that older books have a lot more text and newer more formulas. More text also means older technical expressions.

 

[jonjacson]

I had a look at it. The originals are publically available. A list of links is e.g.
https://de.zxc.wiki/wiki/Encyklopädie_der_mathematischen_Wissenschaften#Digitalisierte_Ausgabe

It is indeed an interesting read because he spent a lot of effort citing every original reference of all his statements. So it is historically marvelous. Whether it is of scientific interest is a different question. Mathematical textbooks can be divided into a pre-Bourbaki and a post-Bourbaki era. This means that mathematics is written in a different way and we are usually accustomed to the post-B. style. This means in return that it is not automatically easy to read texts from before. The main difference is, that older books have a lot more text and newer more formulas. More text also means older technical expressions.

The content is available... in a language I can't read :(.

Personally I prefer like 100 times the old style to the modern ones because in modern books there is no motivation at all, the mathematical objects are not presented as something necessary to solve a problem, instead they just pop up from nowhere, there is no historical description of the evolution of the ideas, they try to be as abstract as possible... which means as far away as possible from something my mind can imagine and grasp, and the list goes on and on.

 

[Dragon27]

You think they going to get it translated anytime soon? You can learn to read highbrow fiction in your target language in 5-10 years (let alone an encyclopedia) with some average (yet consistent) effort, or faster, if you're enthusiastic enough. Why wait, if you can do the job yourself? Plus, you'll end up knowing a new language, it's a win-win!

 

[Demystifier]

Mathematical textbooks can be divided into a pre-Bourbaki and a post-Bourbaki era. This means that mathematics is written in a different way and we are usually accustomed to the post-B. style. This means in return that it is not automatically easy to read texts from before.

By "we" you mean mathematicians. Most physicists still write math in a pre-Bourbaki style.

 

[vanhees71]

Thanks god! Bourbaki style is killing all the intuition about math. It's an encyclopedia collecting the finished subjects in a formal and standardized way. In this it has great merits, but to learn how math is really done, i.e., how the theorems are found and proven by intuition is not reflected.

The Encyclopedia is just a marvelous masterpiece. If you only look at the author list of the physics volumes, it's clear why. Among the masterpieces are the electromagnetics articles by Lorentz and, of course, Pauli's relativity article, written when he just was a very young student with Sommerfeld.

 

[jonjacson]

You think they going to get it translated anytime soon? You can learn to read highbrow fiction in your target language in 5-10 years (let alone an encyclopedia) with some average (yet consistent) effort, or faster, if you're enthusiastic enough. Why wait, if you can do the job yourself? Plus, you'll end up knowing a new language, it's a win-win!

No, I don't think so. If it has not been done already it would be strange that somebody does it now.

 

[vanhees71]

The article by Pauli on relativity has been translated to English. It's still worth reading!