> On Fri, 27 Nov 1998, Bill Everdell wrote:
>
>> when the *first* edition of Hardy's book was published.
>>
>
> I have the 6th ed., and the dates of that edition and the previous ones
> are given as 1908, 1914, 1921, 1925, 1928, 1933. My copy is a 2nd hand
> one, and it seems that the book was originally awarded to a high school
> student. Would s/he be expected to understand it? It was an Upper VI form
> prize. Is this the last form, from which students would go on to the
> university? The year was 1935.
Hi, Avinoam,
Yes, the Upper VI is indeed the last form in English schools. My guess is
that the recepient of the prize planned to go up to university (Cambridge?)
to read maths, and the book was rightly expected to be of great use there.
But *some* high school students are capable of understanding Hardy even
before they go up to university. In 1952/53, when I was in my last year at
school in Tel-Aviv, I used to go once a week to Adult Education evening
classes, in which the calculus was presented in a rigorous (delta-epsilon)
style. The lecturer was A A Fraenkel (whose set theory course I was to
attend the following year, when I went up to Jerusalem to study maths). A
while after the calculus course had started, an even younger listener
joined us. Although this kid had missed the first few lectures, this didn't
seem to matter, because he knew it all anyway. His name was Yoram
Lindenstrauss; I believe you know him well as he is your colleague.
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