Halsted's “Elements of Geometry”

Abstract

MR. HALSTED is already favourably known to English mathematicians by an excellent “Elementary Treatise on Mensuration” (published in the summer of 1881), and by one or two carefully compiled bibliographies in the American Journal of Mathematics. The faithful chronicler records of Tom Tulliver that he called his Manual of Geometry “the exasperating Euclid,” a title richly deserved if his desire to be excused the “doing” of it were really based upon the reason he assigned, viz. “It brings on the toothache, I think.” Now we have not an annotated copy of the “Mill on the Floss,” and so cannot identify the particular edition which produced such a wretched result, but we doubt not it was one of the ordinary small text-books with which youth were well acquainted, in shape at least, at the time referred to. And this makes us allude to the portentous dimensions of the book before us, which consists of sone 370 large octavo pages. The book is not for schoolboys, but is intended for students of larger growth. It commences, as does also “The Elements of Plane Geometry” (brought out by the Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching), with a preliminary chapter on Logic, which gives sufficient introduction to a subject in which “the mind first finds logic a practical instrument of great power.”

The Elements of Geometry.

By G. Bruce Halsted. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1885.)