Read May-June and August 2003
Copy borrowed from Ramsey County Library, Roseville and Maplewood branches
Essay written August 30th, 2003

Okay. I checked this out in May and figured I could read it easily within the nine weeks allotted, since I can renew books twice. It's full of math problems, so it's slow going because you stop and think and follow the procedures, so you can only get through so many pages in one day. I had only had the book for three weeks and was about to renew it when I discovered that somebody else had put a hold on it, and I had to return it. Apparently the Ramsey County Library only has one copy. So I had to quit after chapter nine, about halfway through the book.

July passed and the book remained out. Finally it was in again in August and I grabbed it. (Yes, I could have just put a hold on it myself and gotten it earlier, but I didn't.) Recommenced with chapter ten, finished it up earlier today. That's why the dates are staggered. Like when Grover Cleveland became the 22nd and the 24th president.

Pretty good book. Fun problems to solve. Sometimes I don't think the problems were stated very well, either because it's translated from the Russian or because it was written sixty or seventy years ago. But otherwise I liked it. The kind of math book I think my dad would get a kick out of.

I was a little confused however by Item #127, which begins the discussion of electronic circuits to perform logical operations. The bit about vacuum tubes made sense, but the parenthetical mention of transistors gave me trouble. Perelman died in 1942, but transistors weren't invented until 1947. Was something added in the translation, perhaps? Did somebody else write this passage, or chapter, or half of the book? I'm tempted to write the publisher, the address of which is given on the last page as:

Think it would still get there?

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