Teacher looking for a good geometry textbook
Alan
looking for recommendations on a "good geometry book" to use. The
book should be targeted for honors students or college level. My
perspective on what makes a good book is one that rigorously covers
Euclidian geometry with the major emphasis on formal proof. I have no
problems with books that use real world examples and hands on
explorations, but the ones that I have seen that go this direction do
so at the expense of how much time they can devote to perusing formal
proof. Also we have no computers in the classroom.
One book I have seen a description of on the web is "Essentials of
Geometry for College Students" by Lial, Steffensen & Johnson. Has
anyone used this book and would like to comment??
Thanks for any help!
Alan Sagan
PS: Currently we are using Barbara Pool’s college algebra text
and I am just ecstatic with how this book is working out.
Dennis Wallace
Littell, authors Rhoad, Milauskas, Whipple. I don't know if it is still
published but is the best I found in 29 years of math.
Dennis
Neal Silverman
Weeks and Adkins. This is an old (circa 1961) book originally
published by Ginn. You will be hard-pressed to find a book with more
challenging material and really good "originals" (ie, proofs). The
book is so good that someone bought the rights to it, and continues to
publish it. (The company is called Bates, w/ a website at
http://www.batespub.com.) There are many schools which use this a
textbook for honors geometry.
It does need supplementing if you want to cover transformational
geometry. A good textbook, much more up-to-date, is "Geometry" by
Jurgensen/Brown/Jurgensen, which used to be published by Houghton
Mifflin (but which is now McDougall-Littell, I think).
Thomas Foregger
some of the posters that the Weeks and Adkins book
and the Geometry for Enjoyment and Challenge are pretty good
if you are looking for books that are currently in print.
I personally think that if you can find a copy
of one of the Welchons and Krickenberger books,
say at one of the online used book sites,
you may prefer that for its emphasis on proof.
There are many editions dating back to 1938 or so.
Beware though of the later ones that have the name
Welchons and Krickenberger with other authors added.
Probably the 1952 edition is one of the best.
If you want a rigorous high school geometry though
you might look into using one of the paperback
editions with the Hilbert postulates.
There is also a school edition based on Hilbert
axioms published around 1960 by Addison -Wesley that
is available on the used books sites.
tom foregger
Neal Silverman
(plane and solid) first came out in the 1930's, and were revised
through the 1930's and 40's (although w/out much real change). In the
early 50's, they were released under the titles "New Plane Geometry"
and "New Solid Geometry," with some of the theorems proved a little
differently from the prior editions. In the mid-to-late 50's, all the
Welchons/Krickenberger books (the 1st and 2nd yr algebras, plane
geometry, solid geometry) were revised by Helen Pearson, who was a
colleague of W & K from Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis.
(They also had a book called Trigonometry w/ Tables, circa 1953, which
Pearson revised in 1962 as "Modern Trigonometry".)
Incredibly, the geometry book was reissued as late as 1976 by Ginn
under the title "Plane Geometry w/ Space Concepts." It was virtually
identical to the circa 1959 edition. SOmetime in the 1980's, there
was a much more modern release published called "Geometry" by Helen
Pearson and James LIghtner, which had just a little bit of the
"flavor" of the old Welchons/Krickenberger books left.
I can tell you that since high school, I have had a copy of the 1943
W/K "Solid Geometry" with a beautiful hardbound "Teachers' Key," and I
refer to this book all the time. (And we're talking about a time
period of almost 35 years here.)
When the Dolciani algebras came out circa 1962 or so, the
Welchons/Krickenberger/Pearson algebras, which had previously
dominated the market, all but went out of use. People used to laugh
at them for their "bag of tricks" approach to algebra, and their poor
teminology, much of which was vastly improved by Dolciani. Maybe some
of that criticism was deserved. But the geometries (both plane and
solid) were really wonderful textbooks with marvelous collections of
problems. When Weeks/Adkins came out, we saw a book with enormously
more challenging and satisfying problems, which would stimulate even
the best students. But millions of students learned from Welchons/K
and really knew their geometry.
m...@talmanl1.mscd.edu
> Subject: God geometry textbooks
Boy, I hope that was a typo, or I'm *way* out of my depth... :-)
> I agree...as to Welchons-Krickenberger.
>
> <SNIP>
>
> (They also had a book called Trigonometry w/ Tables, circa 1953, which
> Pearson revised in 1962 as "Modern Trigonometry".)
The copy of Trigonometry with Tables that I have (not the copy I studied
from, but the copy my sister studied from three years later) has an
initial copyright date of 1954 and a second copyright date of 1957. In
the days when I studied from it, I wasn't in the business of criticizing
texts, and really had nothing to compare it with. Later on, it seemed
to me to be a competent job, but not outstanding. The book itself did
not inspire me; the content did--and would have from any book. Perhaps
most telling, I rarely refer to it for either problems or content,
though I frequently have done so with the elementary calculus text I
used for two years beginning only a year later than I studied from WK.
-Lou Talman