Posted by tpc at January 17th, 2009

The tour de force by E.T. Whittaker and G.N. Watson. The Math Reviews says that the 1996 reprint of the 1927 fourth edition has 608 citations! It’s certainly a magnificent book and worthwhile to have on your shelf.

The 1996 cambridge version on amazon is listed at USD$94. But I just found a new version from merchant books also listed at amazon for USD$25! The details state that the new version has 568 pages vs the 616 pages of the original. So are these two the same? Obviously if I refer to page 408, it would be a different page altogether and it would be in my mind insane to re-typeset the whole book. Unfortunately, Amazon links the reviews for the 1996 versions to the new version, including the previews. So there’s no way of confirming my suspicions that there are differences.