[OT] Maths GCE O-Level text books from 70s-80s ?

[Bob Eager]

Even better is

- ONE of the places it searches is Abebooks!

[Bob Eager]

No, I never saw A level papers. In any case, at that time I was too busy teaching compiler writing and managing a VAXcluster!

[Bob Eager]

At my PPoE we didn't ask for A level maths for a CS entry. No point - we'd have reduced our potential intake considerably, and it wouldn't have done much good.

The 'good' GCSE passes were sometimes better then the ones who had A level. What with different exam boards, and teachers just 'teaching to the exam', there was no consistency.

25% of the first year was selected maths, to A level standard and beyond.

[Martin Brown]

Yes. Certain. I refer you to Q6 and Q7 on this London board paper 1976

(looks like the full spherical trig treatment was withdrawn by then)

It was certainly in the 1975 Astronomy syllabus of the London board.

[Tim Watts]

Thanks Bob - trying that next...

I have a feeling we had more than one book - unlike A Level (which was

2) and Physics (1 each at O and A).

[spuorgelgoog]

SMP Maths until we changed syllabus at Christmas before the exams.

From a moderately recent TV series where children were sent back to 1950s s chool, the Eleven Plus maths papers seemed rather harder than current GCSE.

I find awesomebooks useful as their prices start at about £2.79 and in clude P&P.

Do not, under any circumstances, even look inside a Tee Jay maths book -- C omic Sans and clipart everywhere, and the answer sheets at the back are rid dled with errors.

Owain

[Tim Watts]

11+ is still hard - but not on subject matter as general difficulty.

Cool - thanks.

Reminds me of a Z80 assembler book in the 80s that had a happy 40pin DIP chip character doing banal things on every other page!

[Bob Eager]

I once set a very bright student some work to do during the summer (paid).

I wanted it documented, and the nature of the thing was that the documentation included code samples.

Most would use Courier or similar. He resented including the code, so he did it in 6 point Gothic.

[ARW]

Just found that in the loft

Cannot find that one in the loft

Can only find Roger Muncasters A level one in the loft

A pity I cannot find the special 13A plug I made up with the L and N shorted together that we (me and a couple of mates) used to plug into the odd socket around the school for a laugh[1]. Neither "GobEye" the caretaker or Basher Bates (deputy head master) never found out what caused the occasional socket circuit to fail.

[1] Good at assembly time as it turned off the organ half way through the hymn.

[The Other John]

We used to spit on a bit of blotting paper and put it between a light bulb and its BC socket. When switched on it would smell for a bit then blow the fuse!

[ARW]

And the rest:-)

Holding a lightswitch in a halfway position until the room stank of fish as you burnt out the light switch (fluorescent lights), filling a fitting (gold fish bowl type) full of water.

[Andy Burns]

Nope, image search didn't turn up any that looked familiar to me, we had one master who would make a point of referring us to some crusty copy of Tranter in the library.

[Cursitor Doom]

70s text books aren't bad, but 50s are much better; far more rigorous. And the precision and clarity of language was so much better back then. Maths is one of the few sciences that doesn't go out of date, too.

[John Rumm]

I remember doing matrices for O Level - only thing was they taught you how to add subtract and multiply (although not how to take an inverse - so you could not "divide"). Tricky thing was all the teachers could never think of a decent example of what you might want to do with one!

(although I suspect that answers involving convolution, signal and image processing might have been a bit past us at the time! Nifty way of solving simultaneous equations though ;-))

[Rob Morley]

We used SMP for O level, the numbered books - there was also a set of lettered books, I'm not sure if they were for a different syllabus or for GCE.

[Huge]

It took me the best part of 35 years for me to come across a use for matrices.

(Computer hashing algorithms, since you ask.)

[Tim Watts]

Maths may be OK - but it would be interesting to try to explain pre SI physics texts :) I read my dad's engineering books - ft-lbs, dyns, ergs. Ow...

On an aside, I found this:

(London, 1968 A Level).

I can't do most of those - although the material looks familiar - I would have to relearn much of it!

[spuorgelgoog]

I knocked out the school Tannoy system for a while with some strategically placed terminal blocks.

Owain

[Tim Watts]

Probability and coordinate transformations are two uses - the latter I found really interesting. You can get a matrix to scale an object represented by a series of vectors for the points. Yoiu can get another matrix to rotate by x degrees.

Multiply the 2 matrices and you get a matrix that will do both transformations in one operation.

Find the inverse of the matrix and it will reverse the operation.

I wonder if those are used in video cards for rendering?

[Tim Watts]

Thanks - I'll check out the SNP books - even if they weren't my exact books, they should prove useful.