An Introductory Account of certain Modern Ideas and Methods in Plane Analytical Geometry

Abstract

DR. SCOTT'S treatise is a welcome addition to the many excellent text-books on analytical geometry which have been published during the last few years. But while most of the text-books in use at the present time adequately explain the initial difficulties of the subject, scarcely one can be regarded as a satisfactory book for those students who wish to go beyond the elements as treated with the use of Cartesian coordinates. For such students Salmon's “Conies”is still the standard work. But although every fresh edition of this is carefully revised to meet modern requirements, there are many beautiful geometrical methods and theories which are only briefly noticed, but which should be fully discussed in a standard work. The book under review does not, indeed, aim at replacing Salmon's, but it is admirably adapted to be used as a companion to it. It aims at giving a concise account of the principal modern developments due to Cayley, Clebsch, Reye, Klein, and a few other continental geometers. As an introduction to the study of the higher branches, it may be confidently recommended to students as a clear, full, and well-arranged exposition of the leading principles of the subject. At the same time the book is something more than a text-book for students. Those who wish to keep up their mathematics, and have no time to spare to read the various papers and memoirs that are published every year, will find much that will interest them—many beautiful geometrical ideas that are here published for the first time in an English text-book.

An Introductory Account of certain Modern Ideas and Methods in Plane Analytical Geometry.

By Charlotte Angas Scott Professor of Mathematics in Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. Pp. xii. + 288. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894.)