Abstract
WE are much pleased with this book as a good text-book for teaching geometry. It is evidently the work of one who has been at the pains to consider well what are the difficulties which the average pupil encounters. It is the work, too, of one who has seen what the fault of the school teaching of geometry has hitherto been, and who is determined, as far as lies in his power, to remedy it. The evil of school-teaching has been that Euclid has been learned by rote, or when things have not been so bad as that, its propositions have been regarded too much as only abstract truths, which neither have been elucidated by nor have been used to elucidate natural phenomena or the ordinary things of life. Mr. Aldis supplies this defect by an admirable series of examples and exercises appended to each proposition, calculated to give a practical turn to the whole study in the mind of a beginner, and to familiarise him early with the idea that he can really make use of the subject, and can give it a vast variety of application. Mr. Aldis frequently gives more than one demonstration of the same proposition. This also is very useful in teaching, inasmuch as it practically informs the pupil that the truths of geometry are independent of any particular demonstration of them, and gets him into the habit of approaching any problem from more than one point of view. The present is a first instalment. It contains pretty nearly what is in Euclid's first four books.
Text-Book of Geometry.
Part I. By T. S. Aldis, Senior Mathematical Master, Manchester Grammar School. (Deighton, Bell, and Co.)
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S., J. Text-Book of Geometry . Nature 5, 23 (1871). https://doi.org/10.1038/005023a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/005023a0