[email protected] wrote: > It isn't necessary to go so far back. A large part of the important > mathematics of the 1980s and 1990s does not appear in textbooks, or > does so only implicitly, because there is little incentive for > anyone to rewrite it.>> > > This is a contradiction. If work on Number Theory were "important" than > surely my new book on Number Theory would include it. > If editors are solely referring to old notebooks, than that's their own > issue. > That doesn't prevent the rest of us, from using only the newest textbooks if > we so choose. > The very definition of "important" is, that many people cite it. > If no one cites it, it's not important. > This is a bizarre definition of "important"; it might work for "influential" or "popular", but that is not what makes something important. Many new ideas are tangential to a general education about a subject, but are no less important to the advancement of knowledge. Textbooks are instruments for parroting the party line of received wisdom. They do little to address controversial issues.
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