Schubert calculus is named after Hermann Schubert who wrote his book on a new kind of counting geometry in 1879.
The goal of our project is to prove a modern rendition and an English translation. Our starting point are the image files from archive.org and the full text available.
In the advent of MathJax it is possible to write this book as an HTML page
or as traditional LaTeX. MathJax does not render in GitHub flavored markdown,
but we can post our results on Github pages in the gh-pages branch.
Strategy - divide the book into its original chapters and sections and translate piece by piece. As this is an exercise in mathematics and not just translation, I will keep my personal notes and observations in separate files.
With Google translate it may be possible to translate large sections of the book with relative ease, checking the results make sense.
07/08 There were two books I was interested in reading:
Reading these texts would require attaining fluency in a new language (German) with limited payout since a lot of these books have been replaced by modern texts and modern theorems. Three years ago, I would have argued that math has not gotten harder that there are simply more bells and whistles. As far as the amount of content we are producing the quality may even have gone slightly down. These days I very politely say we are forgetting as much as we are learning.
I had been hoping for a different perspective than the textbooks have been giving me. Spending time in a library and seeing the old books, explicit computations had been purged. Without good judgement we drown in pages of algebra and no clear outcome. This just makes the successes of the 19th century all the more mysterious.
In English or French I have no difficulty translating. We get to heard it straight from the horses's mouth:
- [C] works of Sir Arthur Cayley
- [D] works of GH Hardy
- [E] Leçons sur l'intégration et la recherche des fonctions primitives (Henri Lebesgue)
- [F] Lezioni di Geometria Differenziale (Luigi Bianchi)
These books are old and slightly incorrect, but they were innovative in their day and we can read them and still learn a lot. And I argue their modern counterparts have not replaced them. I imagne if we have stopped reading Shakespeare because now we have JK Rowling? I havent even read any of the Harry Potters except for chunks of the first one (and that was a Spanish translation).
I don't want to be a mindless translator. For sum of money, I could go find a good German-to-English technical translator and in a few weeks she or he will be done and I will have my book. Thats not what I'm after. A nice role-model could be the Heath translation of Euclid's Elements which has lots of commentary. Why lots of commentary? because I have something to say. Stuff that may not be in the original text at all.
Lastly, if I had read so much as a paragraph each day and posted a translation on here, I would have been midway through both texts.