A new book on Sage, for high school students in Poland

[Andrzej Giniewicz]

Hello,

I'd like to mention a new book using Sage I co-authored, that got
released last week.

It is in Polish and covers all mathematics topics from high school,
according to the current core curriculum in Poland. It is not a
textbook, but supplemental material, which aims to wake up the
imagination on the way to proper understanding of mathematics topics.
This is why decided to use mathematical package to remove the burden
of calculations, and this is why we also decided to use lot of
references to pop-culture and imagined stories - sea snake named
Ssstefan approaching the Viking ship helps to understand function
transformations, Brian the crocodile tamer helps to see overlapping
intervals.

We covered all major interfaces (Cell, Cloud, Notebook, iPhone,
Android apps). It is 352 pages, typeset using PDFLaTeX+SageTeX package
(we had to adjust it a bit, because we decided to save images in SVG
and then convert to TikZ using https://github.com/kjellmf/svg2tikz -
for 3D graphics we decided to output png from Tachyon and then added
overlay in TikZ, which was more tricky, but also worked).

It would be cool if our book could be mentioned on
http://www.sagemath.org/library-publications.html#books - and it would
be also very helpful if we could hear some opinions. Especially, that
we have some plans on making an English version in the future - and
any opportunity to improve would be great (we need to find some budget
for professional translation service, as there are jokes and ideas in
the book that do not translate 1-1).

Below are some release informations:

Authors: Andrzej Giniewicz, Katarzyna Zajączkowska
Title: "Zrozumieć matematykę z pakietem Sage" (translation:
"Understand mathematics with the Sage package")
Publisher: GiS (http://www.gis.wroc.pl/)
ISBN: 978-83-62780-42-6
Year: 2015
Web page: http://www.eurekacode.com/matematyka

Sorry, but web pages are in Polish.

It is kind of self-promotion, but I think it is still relevant. (btw,
do we have separate list for such announcements?)

We are looking forward to hearing some opinions,
Thanks,
Andrzej Giniewicz & Katarzyna Zajączkowska.

[kcrisman]

I'd like to mention a new book using Sage I co-authored, that got
released last week.

This is awesome!  We should definitely get this advertised on the website as soon as possible.

[john_perry_usm]

I looked at a sample chapter; I don't read much Polish at all, but some of it still makes sense. ;-) More seriously, I liked how some of the graphs are diagrammed (snake picture) but not too many and the typeface. Can I ask what typeface that is?

john perry

[Andrzej Giniewicz]

Hello,

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 3:16 PM, john_perry_usm <john....@usm.edu> wrote:
> I looked at a sample chapter; I don't read much Polish at all, but some of
> it still makes sense. ;-) More seriously, I liked how some of the graphs are
> diagrammed (snake picture) but not too many and the typeface.

I'm really glad you liked it! That was one of our main ideas - to help
readers imagine the snake represented by the function (which is
complicated for high school student, but thanks to mathematical
package drawing it is as simple as drawing linear function). During
experiments few years back, we found that it makes the function
translations easier to remember and understand. We believe it helps
remember the rules when the students actually needs to use them,
because they have something to relate the theory to.

Probably this is why it took us 3.5 year to complete (well, lets say
at least some of it was spent on looking for publisher brave enough to
release math books with such illustrations). And yes, 3.5 years ago,
we started our work targeting Sage 4.8 (which was current by that
time) - and keeping the book up to date during this period was a quite
interesting task. We probably wouldn't be able to complete such a big
project without some server setup. We actually wrote mercurial hooks
that compiled whole book including running Sage and producing ready
made pdf when we entered [rebuild] into commit message - then it was
commited to same repository so we could diff both pdf, LaTeX and Sage
outputs on version updates or text updates. SageTeX also helped us a
lot, because almost all results and figures were made real-time, so
always up to date and matching what the student will get.

> Can I ask what typeface that is?

Of course! We used Palatino clone (more exactly it is URW Pal­la­dio L
with true Small Caps and Old Style Figures for text and Lining Figures
for tables, as provided by mathpazo LaTeX package). The sans family is
provided by Bera font (Bitstream Vera clone, as provided by berasans
LaTeX package) - it is scaled by 0.86 to match x height of URW
Palladio L. Monospaced font is Luxi Mono, scaled by 0.95. There are
also some extra fonts for math symbols (mosty based on Euler font
family) and text symbols (some dingbats-like glyphs), but they are
used very rarely.

Regards,
Andrzej.

[Andrzej Giniewicz]

Hi.

I noticed book is already there, but Author names were copy-pasted
from position above. This should be "Andrzej Giniewicz and Katarzyna
Zajączkowska" - not "Thorsten Theobald and Sadik Iliman". Also, in
title instead of "ę" there is "\ce" and instead of "ć" there is "ç".
And - the publication year also was copied from post above I believe,
as we are already on the shelves in 2015 :)

If there are some issues with encoding, this is html-encoded title:

"Zrozumie&#263; matematyk&#281; z pakietem Sage"

and names:

"Andrzej Giniewicz and Katarzyna Zaj&#261;czkowska"

Thanks,
Andrzej.

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[slelievre]

Fixed.

2015-11-17 09:45:23 UTC+1, Andrzej Giniewicz:

[Andrzej Giniewicz]

Thank you!