Slashdot Mirror
Calculus Textbook Author James Stewart Has Died
Onnimikki writes James Stewart, author of the calculus textbooks many of us either loved or loved to hate, has died. In case you ever wondered what the textbook was funding, this story has the answer: a $32 million dollar home over-looking a ravine in Toronto, Canada.
... Figures.
He died nearly 2.5 weeks ago. That's pretty fast for Slashdot.
Having passed away, since Mr Stewart can no longer update the textbook every year or so, does this mean that this Calculus text will finally stabilize, stop being updated, and the prices would drop?
Somehow I greatly resent people who profit massively from kids' math textbooks. He was such a person.
Here's a picture of some Indian kids using a bridge as a school.
Wonder how much toll Stewart would feel they should pay him for the privilege of learning stuff invented by Newton.
http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h--/q-95/sys-images/Environment/Pix/pictures/2013/9/18/1379522585111/Indian-children-attend-a--008.jpg
+5 funny.
I've never heard of this guy. All the calc I took at the college level used Thomas and Finney. Maybe he authored the text for my AP courses in HS, but those texts were less memorable. The teachers in those classes really made the difference, and they were fantastic. I still have my Thomas and Finney, and crack it open every few years to see if one thing or another still makes sense.
Nope. Just because Mr Stewart isn't around doesn't mean new updates/reshuffles won't be coming out every year.
First of all.... he's probably already written the plan for next 2 to 3 year's worth of versions of the books
Second of all.... his editor can continue to make minor updates to the book ad infintium.
a wonderful life?
Better than Leithold, not as good as Frahleigh.
Some day we will all divide by 0
Having passed away, since Mr Stewart can no longer update the textbook every year or so, does this mean that this Calculus text will finally stabilize, stop being updated, and the prices would drop?
Uh, no. When this happens, publishers just find another "co-author" to add on to the title page. If it's like most textbooks, the new author will make a few minor tweaks here and there, rewrite only one chapter in any significant way (or simply add a new chapter somewhere), and then move back to the standard "renumber the pages and exercises" for subsequent "revised" editions.
Ahahahaha. *cough cough* Sorry, excuse me hahahaha
rewrite only one chapter in any significant way (or simply add a new chapter somewhere), and then move back to the standard "renumber the pages and exercises" for subsequent "revised" editions.
Rewrite? As in actually revise the text? No way.
I teach out of a thermodynamics text that gets churned every year or so. Never mind that engineering thermodynamics hasn't changed a whit in about a century, but the homework problems get reshuffled. Once in a while they'll actually try to rewrite some of the homework problems, mangling them badly. I redo all of the problems to ensure that the solutions are actually correct (many are not). I'm actually writing many of my own homework problems now and allowing students to purchase any edition of the text that they can find (as the 3rd edition is effectively as good as the 8th edition as far as being a reference to solve problems).
It's pissing me and the students off because they really do need to have a text. However, this churning bullshit and jacking up of prices is actually causing some of the students to try to wing it through the class without a text, which is not going to end well They do need a basic reference for exams and practical problems. But they could probably do fine with a text from 1920 if they were comfortable using it.
Textbook publishers are right up there with advertisers and telephone sanitizers. Shoot the bastards into space and be done with them.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Textbook publishers are right up there with advertisers and telephone sanitizers.
Er, what?
The implications are that someone else will have to shuffle around chapter titles and a couple paragraphs from now on.
Shame that Stewart couldn't do the same thing with his autobiography and extend his own life indefinitely.
I learned from that text, and only just unpacked it onto a shelf the other day.
When I eventually grokked (some) calculus it was via his book.
Peace out, James Stewart.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Well, first-year calculus hadn't changed in 250 years, and second-year calculus hadn't changed in 100 years, so I'm guessing the updating isn't going to stop.
I really fucking hate this about academia. It's absolutely shameless to charge college students $244 for a single dumb textbook. It's not even that good. It's just that when a department chooses to standardize on a textbook, the move has inertia and is basically impossible to reverse. Then, the publisher can charge something absurd, and everybody pays it, because it is a required text. It's so dirty, because it's profiteering from people who are often barely making ends meet, and typically buying the book with debt.
What really bothers me is that nobody seems willing to do anything about it. If a big, publicly funded university system set aside some money to create and regularly update their core STEM curriculum textbooks - let's start with Calculus, Physics, GenChem, GenBio - it would certainly cost less than the almost $1000 per student that the textbook purchases cost. These universities have Nobel Prize winners among their faculty, surely they have the in-house resources to create excellent textbooks and distribute them on some sort of open license like CC. Arranging sabbaticals for the authors might cost at most a million dollars, or roughly 4000 Stewart Calculus books. That might be about the number of Calc 1, Phys 1, GenChem and GenBio books that are sold on a single campus in a single year.
But this move would help everybody, not just within the entire UC system that funded the effort, but across the globe. And the costs of updating and embellishing future editions would be far less. I'm so mad that a large university system doesn't just make this happen. And yes, raise fucking tuition by $200 to pay for it, if you absolutely have to. In exchange for textbooks you can have for free (or for printing cost if you don't like digital), everybody will recognize that's a great deal. The courses can explicitly invite students to devise problems for future editions, or to suggest changes and clarifications. And it will bring prestige to the colleges and to the authors, which is worth something too.
Textbook publishers are right up there with advertisers and telephone sanitizers.
Er, what?
No a Douglas Adams fan?
(hint)
Differential and Integral Caculus. From Mir publications, Moscow. Almost all the IITians swear by it. Sadly I lost my copy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So no new edition next year?!
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
But they could probably do fine with a text from 1920 if they were comfortable using it.
So find a good textbook that's out of copyright, scan it (or just get it from Gutenberg.org ), edit anything that needs updated (possibly as part of a group of professors so as to share the work), release a digital copy for free under a creative commons style license, and have a vanity printer run off a few thousand copies -- enough for the students for all the professors using the text. Sell the hard copies for something reasonable -- by textbook standards $100 may be reasonable. The vanity printer should be able to work out a deal with the relevant campus bookstores.
When you run out of copies, do a minor update that retains the current page numbers and add more material at the end. Repeat that for a few cycles. Eventually do a major update that can renumber the pages. For the first few years after that, support both editions.
It's stupid that we let textbook companies control this market. This is a perfect arena for open source. Professors know what they want to teach and should be able to customize their textbooks to support their style. It's silly and pointless that everyone has to use the same textbook. Professors are paid to publish and teach. Publish a textbook. You know that you are going to have to spend time updating your course notes anyway. Go ahead and update the book at the same time.
As you note, the textbook rarely has significant changes. If a small group of professors teaching roughly the same class (e.g. introductory thermodynamics) take the time to release the initial version, subsequent versions should be relatively easy to maintain.
1920 is a good year for the base, as it's out of copyright now.
Textbook publishers are right up there with advertisers and telephone sanitizers. Shoot the bastards into space and be done with them.
Advertisers perform a useful service, but I really have to point out that sending the telephone sanitizers onto the colony ship resulted in the complete destruction of the Golgafrinchans. Why do so many people misperceive that point, and compare (group of people they believe are useless) with the telephone sanitizers?
Agreed, but I actually don't get paid to publish. I am at a teaching college, and I teach a very full load plus do a number of administrative duties.
Your idea is good, but the unfortunate thing is that anyone who puts that much effort into writing a text is eventually drawn to trying to monetizing it, either themselves or by the institution itself. Also, many accreditation organizations want to see mainstream textbooks used. Nothing technically says you need these books, but things suddenly get difficult during accreditation when they start seeing locally published texts on display. Same with printing off a text from 1920 - completely usable and accurate text, but try to defend the use of a century old text when new textbooks are available? Do you want to risk your program's accreditation because of that?
And this is before all the bullshit you need to wade through with the school bookstore trying to turn a buck. I got yelled at for recommending to my students to buy the course text online vs. going through the bookstore ($40-$60 bucks vs $250 at the bookstore for the same text).
College isn't about learning anymore, it's all about making money.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Rewrite? As in actually revise the text? No way.
Thanks for taking one word from my post without the requisite context and using it as a basis for an ill-informed rant (or, rather, an informed rant about something different from what I was talking about).
Look, I hate the textbook edition nonsense as much as you, but my post was specifically about what usually happens when A NEW AUTHOR is added. I know major textbook authors personally. I've seen generational shifts where a new co-author is added onto a textbook. Usually that is when revision is most likely to happen, since the new author will often have a few choice tidbits to add or put their own spin on a few chapters. My post was actually intending to insult these co-authors for the little work they sometimes do when taking over, but you seem to have taken it as though I was somehow praising them or implying they do more than they do.
Whatever. Take a break from your lunatic thermo rant and go sit in on a reading comprehension class sometime.
When I studied calculus the hardest part was studying calculus, not buying the book. Textbooks were a lot cheaper.
Even cheaper, my math teacher used to organize book-buying from Taiwan.
At that time (1959), there was no copyright agreement between the U.S. and Taiwan (and besides, they were fighting Communism), so it was completely legal.
They cost about a tenth of U.S. prices. The publisher he used had reprints of all the popular math and science books (like Dover, except not limited to to public domain). They had an entire Encyclopedia Britannica for about $25.
Dover of course used to re-publish the out-of-copyright and out-of-print math and science classics. There was a time when a professor could have a rare out-of-print book, that nobody else could get, and teach an entire class out of that book. Dover put an end to that.
Of course the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act put an end to Dover (or at least their reprint business) by extending the copyright to 100 years after the author's death.
So the great classics, like Yakov Perelman's Physics for Entertainment (the world's largest-selling physics textbook), are now out of print, even though Perelman died in the siege of Leningrad.
The other source of cheap textbooks was the Soviet Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow, which translated all the great Soviet science and math textbooks, including Perelman's, into every major language of the world, including English, and sold them cheaply everywhere. They were even cheaper than Dover, $2 apiece. And the Soviets didn't believe in copyright, so Dover or anybody could reprint them. I've heard Indian scientists reminisce about how they grew up reading Perelman as children.
It's too bad the Soviet Union didn't survive until the Internet. They could have put all their scientific, literary and music works online copyright-free.
The house will be sold and the proceeds will go to charity.
He was active in his community, and helped the Pride movement get going in Hamilton in the 70s.
There are a lot worse uses for textbook profits than this.
Now we'll never know how the series ends.
Who will blindly rearrange the chapters every year to keep students from buying used texts?
I'm about to finish off another engineering masters (12 classes, no thesis) and this time around, I never bought one textbook. Every professor had a recommended book, but all of the material, homework, and projects were theirs. It was pretty nice and I was quite grateful. Bravo.
Otherwise, in 11 other years of college (BS+BA, MS+MA, PhD), all of my texts were needlessly überexpensive, and I think I've kept a grand total of 4 for reference.
The one exception was the year of ancient Greek I took (for fun and to satisfy elective reqs). I was able to buy a second-hand 1916 edition, which had been exactly reprinted at huge markup 24 times in later years. There's little reason that many math texts couldn't be a similar situation. (I use a lot of maths developed in the 60s-80s, but I do postdoc-level stuff, not undergrad!)
Depressing view. Not saying you're wrong, of course, just that it would be a social good to solve these problems somehow.
This is a good start toward solving the problem: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/onl...
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Well he did.
http://openstaxcollege.org/
It's pissing me and the students off because they really do need to have a text.
How long is this going to be true with resources like Khan Academy, Purple math, and everything else out there?
I am currently pissed at my calculus text(Larson/Edwards 5thEd ETC). While I read the chapters, more than half the book is actually just problems to work out, and worse, the methods to solve said problems are often not in the text. So I'd place my actual learning at about 10% textbook(and I'm being generous), 30% lecture, 20% math tutoring/TA help, 40% internet.
When the teacher is assigning roughly 1/10th of the problems as homework in a manner that often resembles 'this looks good, I like this one', etc... It should be trivial for him to do up said problems on a handout. Well, I'd recommend he make the problems up himself, but you should get the point.
I don't read AC A human right
Well, it seems we're disregarding the actual story in lieu of bitching about textbooks. So here's my story of interest:
My own stupid textbook story is from Statics. The prof listed a textbook, title, version and ISBN. I ordered online to save some cash, everyone else bought from the campus bookstore.
About two weeks in, I've failed every homework problem. Turns out the version that was listed, and the version I had bought, was the METRIC version, while the campus bookstore had ordered the IMPERIAL version, which everyone else, including the professor, had (I checked the ISBNs, mine was right, so either they have two versions under the same number, or the bookstore "corrected" it to the imperial version). The problems were the same, save for the units.
Brief aside: Why the hell is there even an engineering textbook in non-metric units? Who the hell is designing bridges in feet, pounds and slugs? It's probably just to keep American students from buying cheaper foreign copies.
In any case, we worked out a deal - I just copied the text of the problem before showing my work. My grade instantly shot up. Not quite to an A- despite having passed an "Algebra and Trigonometry" class, I'd never actually been taught trig, and was trying to learn it independently for both Statics and Calc II.
I used Protter and Morrey, lo these many decades ago.
I used Stewart's text at McMaster in '82 as a coil-bound, courier-font tome with hand-drawn diagrams for $10. Steward was my 1st year calculus prof and he was the best math teacher I've ever had. He certainly wasn't rich back then, and if he made shrewd investments with his book income, all the power to him. Remember that the publisher sets the price and profit margin, the author only gets a sliver; fortunately, the book sold well. Publishers are like thieves in the way they force schools to unnecessarily sell a new edition every year.
Yay! Only 75 more years until I can study Calculus for free!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Stewart may have been a great teacher, a philanthropist, and a world-class figure-skater (who knows?), but his book was the trash-tier calculus book, and a pioneer of profit-mongering and edition-churning besides. I guess if you've never seen Courant or Apostol, you could be excused for thinking that some 20 pound monstrosity full of yellow boxes, shoddy proofs, and endless repetitive boring excercises was passable, but the truth is that Stewart's book was nothing but a blight on a generation of students. Some of his (evidently) generous royalties ought to have been set aside to correct the intellectual abuse suffered by people forced to learn from any of the forty versions of Stewart's calculus. Heavens, even Thomas/Finney was a better book, and it was awful.
I bear no ill will toward the man or his memory, but I should not mind never seeing his book again.
So I'd place my actual learning at about 10% textbook(and I'm being generous), 30% lecture, 20% math tutoring/TA help, 40% internet.
Since I don't know your specific situation, I could be completely misinterpreting what you mean. But it seems you have 0% "figure out the problem".
Math isn't a subject that has to be learned the way foreign language or geography has to be learned. If you don't have something described to you in a book, then you absolutely need another reference to learn most subjects (such as a TA, Lecture, or Internet).
But with math you never need a reference for anything but definitions, and most definitions should be obvious anyway. There is always a first person to solve a math problem, and he had no references.
Like I said, I could be completely misreading your situation, but from what you wrote, it sounds like if there isn't a template for how to solve every single problem type that you give up. If all you know how to do is follow methods and change numbers around here and there, then you aren't learning math.
The greatest instruction anyone can give a person who pursues math is simply to ask a question that they can solve if they try. Many of us who study math seriously love nothing more than to be given a problem that's just barely out of reach.
That and Physics is the same way.
It's probably why those subjects are "hard" because they require creativity and inspiration to actually do - it's problem solving at its simplest level and it's what those in the engineering fields thrive on.
Anyhow, if you're struck trying to do math problems, you have to realize that they all follow the same pattern. After the subject is introduced, the first few problems will be solved by direct application of the lesson. Then the next few will be ones applying the current lesson and previous lessons. It all accumulates until the final set of problems involves a bunch of skills from the text, from your past math education, and so on.
And if you're struggling, the goal is not do just the required problems, but to start at the beginning of the problem set.and do them all. Yes, it's beyond the assignment, but you have to realize that the assignment is just the tip of the iceberg - a good prof already tells you that the problem set they assign is hard, and to really do it, a good student needs to do the entire set.
Same goes for physics problems. The first few questions directly apply equations and formulas from the chapter. Then the next ones apply several concepts together until you get to the mega one that pulls in multiple methods. And many even have multiple ways of tackling the problem that are correct. (Previous problems will lead y ou down each path thent he final one lets you decide which one you use). On an exam, that's a lifesaver because it lets you try both ways and if you don't get the same answer, you messed up.
The goal is to realize that the text is giving you the tools, the probme is to string those tools together. It's like programming or engineering.
And sometimes the most satisfying problems are the ones that look like they're impossible,but when you start realizing what you have, where you need to go, and little brain power and then AHA!
Hell, one trick I do is you write down everything you know that was given in the problem. Then figure out what you need to answer, and figure out what gets you there. And draw pictures, schematics, whatever to illustrate those factors you know, what you don't, and the pieces you do have. And the pieces that are implied
I see Stewart's book all over the web on file sharing sites. It's reposted more than just about any other book. Didn't seem to hurt him any if he died rich.
I teach out of a thermodynamics text that gets churned every year or so.
Well, then don't. I went through university in the English system, up to and including being a lecturer for a while. The simple solution to this problem is simply to NOT teach out of a text book in this way. It is simply not in the unicersity culture here to to that.
Textbooks are helpful but the students do not need THAT specific textbook.
The first thing to do is write the questions yourself[*]. They're not nearly as hard to write as exam questions because frankly if you screw up a bit on one or two it matters much, much less, they also don't have to be a consistent length or difficulty. You also have a textbook full of questions for insipration. On the courses I was teaching, the lecturers would always hand materials to the next person, and the question sheets often had the year in which the questions were written. One nice undergraduate reminded my of my age by declaring that some of the questions were older than he was.
So, find a few good textbooks and recommend them to the students at the beginning of the course, as a genuine recommendation and not a recommend but I actually mean you have to buy this kind of thing. Then give your lectures and set your questions. The students can then work from the lectures, or any edition of any textbook.
[*] One problem is it seems the American system is based on setting vastly insane numers of questions, which may make this more difficult.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Well, maybe we'll finally be allowed to teach using a textbook from a good author. Man, did I hate Concepts & Contexts. It was bloated, many explanations were bad, the exercises too simplistic and not differentiated enough in terms of difficulty, it used obsolete units of measurement throughout (I had to use this book in a physics class; mathematicians will tell you it doesn't matter, but it did hold people back), many important topics are not discussed at all and it was too expensive for what it was.
And although my last gripe is probably the publisher's fault, it shouldn't have been one single book at all but rather a series. It's a big tome and seriously clumsy to use, printed on the cheapest horrible paper to leaf through that you could possibly imagine.
That book was crap.
To the professors out there. Textbooks don't have to be so expensive. Dover has great titles for under $30. My analysis class was taught with a Dover book and a good teacher. Worked great and saved me who knows how many hundreds of dollars.
"Uh... yeah, Brain, but where are we going to find rubber pants our size?" --Pinky
I cannot believe these kind of crappy comments. I have the textbook written by Stewart. It is excellent. Every book I ever purchased for College (with my own money as I worked through College) I still own. People who complain about the cost of textbooks that are well written, well illustrated, etc and complain about their debt are jackasses as far as I'm concerned. Why don't you have a little admiration for the work that went into creating it. For fuck's sake, sometimes I think that America is full of whiny pieces of shit.
I love all the people crying about what a bad guy Stewart was for making money. No one was coerced into buying his books. You chose to go to college, presumably because you believed it would improve your lot in life. Well, going to college includes mandatory costs which, if you did your homework, you would know. If you didn't want to pay for books, have student loans, etc then you should have made a different decision. Do I like my $100k in loans? No. Do I like that my decision has allowed me to make $190k a year? Yes. Stop crying about your decisions and take some accountability for them.
My statics book used both metric and imperial - both examples and in the questions, there was a mix. That actually turned out to be fairly practical because as a Canadian I saw an awful lot of both in practical use everywhere, so being familiar with both was actually fairly reasonable. If you are living in Europe or somewhere where sane units are used more almost fully in place of crazy units, then going all metric in the textbooks makes sense, but in North America a mixture is probably the best for engineering students.
Since I don't know your specific situation, I could be completely misinterpreting what you mean. But it seems you have 0% "figure out the problem".
Yeah, you're off. Really, my solve rate was darn near 100%, but I hit the occasional spot where I was asking 'what the hell are they looking for me to produce?' - and the answer wasn't in the book.
I wasn't counting the problems where I already knew what to do, or could figure it out without outside assistance. That's practice, not learning. Of my learning, IE learning the symbols, the properties of various constants and such, the execution of various rules*, that was done as I said - mostly NOT using the book.
*Not enough time in the tests to re-derive them, had to memorize
Like I said, I could be completely misreading your situation, but from what you wrote, it sounds like if there isn't a template for how to solve every single problem type that you give up.
I'd hardly call what I did 'giving up'. I would work a problem until I not only had it solved, but I understood the solving method. It must of worked, seeing as how I pulled an A in a class where 90% of my grade was from closed book tests.
I don't read AC A human right
Dover of course used to re-publish the out-of-copyright and out-of-print math and science classics. There was a time when a professor could have a rare out-of-print book, that nobody else could get, and teach an entire class out of that book. Dover put an end to that.
Of course the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act put an end to Dover (or at least their reprint business) by extending the copyright to 100 years after the author's death.
Does anyone ever bother to fact-check their rants before posting them to Slashdot?
Astronomy
Biology and Medicine
Chemistry
Computer Science
Earth Science
Engineering
General Science
Mathematics
Physics
I got yelled at for recommending to my students to buy the course text online vs. going through the bookstore ($40-$60 bucks vs $250 at the bookstore for the same text).
Getting yelled at by stupid or corrupt administrators is part of the job.
College isn't about learning anymore, it's all about making money.
College is what the lecturers and the students make it. If you've got tenure, then you're pretty much untouchable, precisely so that you can take a stand without fear of the repercussions. (Of course, if you haven't got tenure yet, then tread carefully.)
Irony is lost on the average yokel. They think it's something you do after washing laundry.
I teach out of Stewart's Calculus, and here's my "favorite" thing about the text. He has an extensive sidebar detailing the correct spelling of L'Hospital, and why we should honor the man by spelling his name the way he did instead of with the modern French spelling. And then he consistently refers to Johann Bernoulli as John.
I tried to learn trigonometry by heart for a long time, and it never worked.
I would try to learn this : http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu... and could not remember anything with 100% certainty.
Is it cos(a)cos(b)-sin(a)sin(b) or cos(a)cos(b)+sin(a)sin(b), or maybe cos(a)sin(b)+sin(a)cos(b)?
Anyway, the best way for me was to remember the one formula to rule them all (Euler's):
e**ix = cos(x)+i*sin(x)
Using complex addition, multiplication and e**(i*n*x)=(e**(i*x))**n, I can find all the formulas from the cheat sheet easily.
It's less error-prone than learning by heart, and it's much more fun because I understand it and can check it with simple geometry.
I'm not familiar with Stewart's book, but judging from the first chapter on Amazon it looks really good. Lots of examples and thorough explanations without dumbing down the material. He even presents the epsilon-delta definition of a limit, something which my watered down undergraduate classes never touched. Several people have mentioned Dover books. They are best used as supplementary material, or for solidifying your knowledge after you know a subject fairly well. You'll learn far more about electrodynamics from Griffiths ($141 on Amazon) than from any 50 year old Dover text.
The textbook publishers could start following the ways of the fine arts world. As soon as an artist keel over, his/her works become more valuable. Certainly not because the works will be revised annually.
The current generation of educators will probably never make have tenure. It's a concept that's being phased out. University professors these days are more likely to be permatemps.