I very much enjoyed reading through The Annotated Turing which goes through Turing's "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" in careful detail. I saw this question on here and while saddened to find an online platform for doing something similar for papers in general has still not materialised, it did get me thinking if there are other books out there that do something similar to The Annotated Turing for other famous mathematical papers. It seems someone's published a similar book on Goedel's incompleteness theorem just quite recently, so I'd be quite surprised if the list of books annotating famous papers started and ended with these two only.
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1$\begingroup$ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annotated_Alice $\endgroup$– Gerry MyersonCommented Jul 1, 2023 at 1:42
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1$\begingroup$ Mathiesen, Thomas J., and Euclid. “An Annotated Translation of Euclid’s ‘Division of a Monochord.’” Journal of Music Theory 19, no. 2 (1975): 236–58. doi.org/10.2307/843590. $\endgroup$– Gerry MyersonCommented Jul 1, 2023 at 1:48
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1$\begingroup$ This is not exactly mathematics, but Green Lion Press has published some books that annotate some classics, such as by Faraday and Maxwell. $\endgroup$– Timothy ChowCommented Jul 1, 2023 at 4:09
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3$\begingroup$ The Dover edition of Euclid's Elements contains extensive annotations by Heath. $\endgroup$– Timothy ChowCommented Jul 1, 2023 at 13:27
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2$\begingroup$ @C. F. G., Fermat's annotated reading of Diophantus' Arithmetica? $\endgroup$– F ZaldivarCommented Jul 1, 2023 at 17:12
2 Answers
H. M. Edwards, "Riemann's Zeta Function" (Academic Press, 1974, New Edition in Dover, 2001) is an extremely annotated reading of Riemann's classical paper on the zeta function).
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3$\begingroup$ Edwards has also written books annotating Galois's original memoir, and Kummer's work on Fermat's Last Theorem. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 1, 2023 at 4:07
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1$\begingroup$ @TimothyChow Edwards being, after all, the person who popularized the phrase "Read the masters!" (quoting Abel) in his article with the same name! $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 2, 2023 at 3:40
Concerning the book on Gödel's paper ("On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems"), you apparently meant the book Gödel's Proof, which does not seem to be an annotation of the paper, but rather, quoting from the description by the publisher, "a readable and accessible explanation to both scholars and non-specialists of the main ideas and broad implications of Gödel's discovery".
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4$\begingroup$ There is a more recent (2022) annotated version of Gödel's paper: The Annotated Gödel, by Hal Prince. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 1, 2023 at 3:00
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$\begingroup$ @JohnStillwell : Thank you for your comment. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 2, 2023 at 12:26