Marks' First Lessons in Geometry
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Upper-secondary students who want a systematic grounding in plane geometry
- Teachers engaged in mathematics education who care about how classic textbooks are organized
- Readers studying the history of mathematics textbooks and early methods of teaching geometry
- Self-learners with basic English who wish to read slowly and train logical reasoning
Not a good fit for
- Young children with no foundation at all who need explanation in Chinese
- Test-takers who want to drill problems quickly for higher scores and seek exam techniques
- Readers who want only the modern geometric system and will not accept old-fashioned wording
Reading tips
- Prepare a ruler, compasses and scratch paper, and draw figures as you read definitions and construction steps.
- After each section, close the book and restate the key concepts and reasoning steps to check whether you have truly understood.
- When you meet old-fashioned terms, first infer their meaning from context, then check against a modern textbook.
- Work through the chapters in order; skipping is not advised, lest the chain of reasoning break.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
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- 11
- 12
FAQ
What level of learner is this book suitable for?
Is the content very different from modern geometry textbooks?
What should I do if the English original is hard to read?
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About the author
Bernhard Marks (1832–1913) was a textbook writer about whose life little is recorded; public information is limited, and details of his nationality, education, and career cannot be reliably confirmed. What can be established is that he wrote Marks' First Lessons in Geometry, an introductory geometry textbook intended for beginners, which guides readers through the basic concepts and figures of geometry in a step-by-step manner. Judging from its title and structure, the book emphasizes accessibility and readability, seeking to turn abstract geometrical knowledge into material that beginners can readily absorb, and to suit both classroom teaching and self-study. Such textbooks were common in European and American elementary education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they helped popularize basic geometry and foster a sense of space in young learners. Although the author himself is not widely known, the work remains a useful reference for understanding geometry teaching for beginners in that period.
