Someone please tell me if this sentence (the one in quotation marks) looks wrong to them or not.
The author in question is discussing non-Euclidean geometry, specifically what happens when you try to construct Euclid's shapes on a Poincaré disk:
"...circles in this strange geometry will look like circles; their centers will be skewed toward the side closest to the boundary of the disk, The only circles that look like circles in the usual sense will be those that have centers coinciding with the center of the disk..."
I read that sentence about eight times before finally deciding that the author MUST have left out a "not" right before the part marked in red.
This is not the first suspected error I've encountered but it's the most blatant and annoying one. Typos I can tolerate (but just barely), this kind of meaning-changing omission means my reading comes to a full stop and I lose the thread of the argument.
The book is also quite sloppily written, it seems. I'd have liked a review of Euclid's Five Postulates (Yeah, I should probably KNOW them, and I once did, but it's been 20-odd years since I had to explicitly think of them).
Apparently I'm not the only one who is put off by the casualness of the writing and the way the author makes certain factual leaps without supplying some of the basic facts to a reading audience that would not necessarily be expected to remember them.
82 pages in and I'm close to throwing it aside and trying something else instead. I'm really not happy about that.
It IRRITATES me because this is right at the outer limits of my understanding and memory of maths/logic, and so it does not help when the author leaves stuff out or writes sloppily or uses poor organization. I really would like to learn about non-Euclidean geometry but I don't think this book is going to do it.
It's really too bad that publishers don't offer money-back guarantees. And it's really too bad that they don't proofread books more carefully before releasing them. (And this is a PAPERBACK copy, so apparently it's been out for a couple years.)
2 comments:
I agree with you. The author or editor left out the "not" which should go before the words you put in red.
It doesn't sound to me like this book is going to do what you wanted it to. I'd send it to Goodwill or some place and give up reading it.
Just because it's a paperback doesn't necessarily mean it's been out for a while; some books are never printed in hardback. You might check the publishing date on the back of the title page and see when it was published. If it's recent enough and you're up to it, you could write the publishing company and let them know you think their product, in this case, is shoddily done.
I'm surprised I remembered any of the non-Euclidean geometry I took back in the Jurassic period.
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