3D Books

Beautiful production (typesetting, graphics, layout). The mathematics is on the informal, intuitive side. I consider this a luxury purchase, not an essential part of one's hardcore math library library. Somewhere on the shelf next to Tufte's books on visualization of data.

This is a very interesting book in the Morgan Kaufmann series, and will appeal to those with a mathematical bent. Visualizing quaternions is broken into three parts. Part 1 treats the elements of quaternions, and parts 2 and 3 treats advanced mathematical topics that place considerably more demands on the reader's mathematical knowledge (and also on the author).
Part 1 is an introduction for those readers new to the topic. As far as introductions go, it is not too bad. It does in fact contain one important subject - quaternion interpolation - that is not always covered in other texts. Hanson covers interpolation in part 1 and again in part 2. If your interest is computer animation, this may be sufficient reason to acquire the book...analogous to purchasing an album just to get one song. However, if you are completely new to quaternions and want to develop a firm intuition grounded in first principles, then a book that is at least an order of magnitude better is "Quaternions and Rotation Sequences" by J. B. Kuipers.

Parts 2 and 3 are the most interesting parts of the book. Hanson presents a series of small chapters that discuss quaternions from different advanced mathematical viewpoints (differential geometry, group theory, Clifford algebras, octonions). The chapters are small, and so they by necessity contain references to the literature where the considerable background material required for understanding the topics is developed. If you have a good background in differential geometry and some abstract algebra, then the chapters are quite nice. In this sense, parts 2 and 3 of the book are more appropriate for mathematicians.

The technique of including routine, "turn the crank" type of calculations in the text, and deferring the sometimes considerable details and theory to references allows Hanson to cover more topics than usual. However, it is exactly those details that distinguish between what is useful and well conceived mathematical theory from mathematical gibberish. Deferring details to the literature can also encourage an over-reaching of the author beyond his understanding of the material. Hanson has walked a fine line here, but still I must mention two issues that I found annoying:

1) A Riemannian manifold is not specified only by giving the charts ("local patches") as Hanson seems to think on page 352. One must also add constraints on the topology -- typically Hausdorff with a countable basis of open sets. These are not just moot considerations; the topology allows a construction of a partition of unity which in turns guarantees the existence of the Riemannian metric. In particular, the mild condition of paracompactness will ensure the existence of the partition of unity.

2) It is a gross over-simplification, and mathematically non-trivial, to claim the basis vectors of Euclidean space have precise analogs in Fourier transform theory, as Hanson does on page 340. Heuristic analogs...yes... but precise analogs?...only if one has developed the necessary mathematical machinery using the theory of distributions. The inner product relation ei.ej = kronecker delta ij given by Hanson on page 340 would have to be generalized to a delta function. It was one of the major accomplishments of 20th century mathematics that Schwartz was able to put the delta function on a firm mathematical basis with his theory of distributions (for which he received the Fields medal) Before Schwartz, delta functions were at best a useful computational tool in the hands of physicists like Dirac who were guided by their physical intuition, and at worst, an example of the mathematical gibberish alluded to earlier.



In short, this is a good book for those with the mathematical prerequisites. Those with a more traditional background in computer science might be advised to first peruse a copy at their local bookstore to verify it matches their interests.

The book uses the traditional red/green images with special glasses in order to produce the 3-D effects. Some poeple may have trouble getting used to this (if you are not good at looking at 3-D objects using red/green glasses, then this is not the book for you). The trick is to stare at it for a long while and to make sure you have the book far away enough so that the whole page can be viewed by either eye. If you do this, the images can be spectacular (though after a while, the novelty starts to wear off a little). It would have been nice if they also had 3-D shots of nebula as well as our solar system. Images of the galaxy can be confusing as they use a weird coding system of characters. I wish they would have used another technology to makes the images 3-D (assuming it is possible), so that the colors of the stars could be more accurately represented. Definately a try before you buy book as some people will like it, others may not. Perhaps it makes a good book to put in the library or a local book club (assuming you can make sure nobody steals the glasses). I would have given this book 3.5 stars if possible (unfortunately, I can only give 3 or 4 stars).

The book is okay it's good to use when you are first timer who doesn't know what their doing. I would reccomend it being used in schools for art class or in a community center for arts and crafts.

Well, although you've never seen the cover, the exerpt or even a review yet ( this is the only review), I'll say if you are a spongebob addict, like me you'll love this book. You'll like it especially if besides spongebob, your favorite character is Patrick.

It comes with a small hand held 3D viewer (the clear plastic kind). The back of the box explains how to use them (if you are unfamiliar).

Each card has two side by side pictures (because of the type of 3D). It looks as if they are outdoor photos (although they went through some effort with that) of green and grey models. Plenty of texture to make up for the lack of creative coloring, however. Above each picture is the name of the animal, and something about God written on the bottom (like "Designed in the mind of our Creator God!")

The back of each card has bible verses, a cartoon drawing of the dinosaur saying something relating to the commentary and bible verse, as well as a drawing of the skull, what the name translates to, the height, length, estimated weight, date "created on", Diet, where the fossils were found, and the year they were rediscovered.

Here is an example of the bible verse (and commentary) on the back of the Troodon card: "The Bible says: When God finished His creating, there was nothing bad in His Creation: no sin, no killing, and no death." followed up by the verse "Genesis 1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, (it was) very good. And the evening and morning were the sixth day."

This is a beautifully illustrated book, wonderful color photos, outlining
the author's methods. This is for intermediate to experienced quilters.
The author's work is gorgeous and colorful, and the directions are well thought out. Cara Gulati is well known in the Quilt Art world and has won several prizes for her work.

This is a good fold-out book especially for young kids just learning that their bodies have insides:) It's not really a book, just a cover that has a flip out body about the size of a five year old. All the parts are labelled and each system is pointed out, a good tool for homeschoolers just learning about the human body.

This is a good gift for kids and adults alike. I found it to be something that you can go back to time and time again. The book consists of images that have 3-D images inbeded into them. After staring at the image the background 3-D images takes for and you can see it. It takes some time to get the method but as a fun gift it is pretty good.

"Outrageous 3-D Reptiles" is a "very cool book" in the opinion of my 5-year old. Including a pair of 3-D "glasses", this book has 3-dimensional pictures of reptiles ranging from chameleons to crocodiles. Each photo is accompanied by a breif description of the animal, including what it eats and where it lives. A great book for children, especially those interested in reptiles.

This book offers a great variety of options for 3D projects with all the information to get your started, over what ever fear you might have and into the creative fun that can be had! The author starts with essentials, paper mache, styrofoam and brown paper that anyone can use and shows some wonderful projects for beginners. They include excellent masks, wonderful creapy creatures. Some of the urethane foam work is completely unexpected and not such a common starting point for most people. The author includes wire framing, puppets - just an incredible assortment. I purchased this book for myself and love it, but it would have been great to have when I had children around looking for things to do. Truly a book for all ages