This is intended (eventually) to be a book “Introductory Statistics with R”. There are already rather a lot of multivariate statistics books around, but I wanted to emphasise the applications (and introduce contemporary applications) with a little more mathematical detail than happens in many such “application/software” based books.

The book itself, along with source material, is under the GFDL and available from the opentextbook subversion respository:

• http://knowledgeforge.net/opentextbook/svn/multivariatestatistics/

The book description says:

This is a text on elementary multivariable calculus, designed for students who have completed courses in single-variable calculus. The traditional topics are covered: basic vector algebra; lines, planes and surfaces; vector-valued functions; functions of 2 or 3 variables; partial derivatives; optimization; multiple integrals; line and surface integrals.

The book also includes discussion of numerical methods: Newton’s method for optimization, and the Monte Carlo method for evaluating multiple integrals. There is a section dealing with applications to probability. Appendices include a proof of the right-hand rule for the cross product, and a short tutorial on using Gnuplot for graphing functions of 2 variables.

There are 420 exercises in the book. Answers to selected exercises are included.

Update 2008-05-06: The LaTeX source is now available!

Update 2009-11-14: Link corrections done to fix errors. Update 2008-04-16: After contacting Alain, he’s told me that the source material for the textbook is also available. He also said its worth noting that the text is part of a “package including homeworks, tests, exams, etc.” and that it is “a standalone version of part of what is to be a three semester volume text, starting with arithmetic and ending with differential calculus”. We’ll certainly look forward to seeing this develop!

We will write textbooks in the open where contents are made available on the Internet from initial outline to final manuscript. This would allow every teacher, parent, student, professional, DepEd official, virtually anyone, to review the textbooks even before they get published.

We will release the textbooks under a license that would permit everyone to use and publish the textbooks without paying royalty to anyone. Thus, saving the government of content development costs and allowing more publishers to fulfill the demands of public (and even private) schools.

They’ve currently got [two books]( http://blog.bayanihanbooks.org/books) – Mathematics – Grade 1 and Next Generation Health Governance – which are both being developed on wikis. Its great to hear that they’ve been developing the books with close attention to national standards and institutional requirements.

They are clearly keen to allow publishers to print and sell the books,

Since the materials from the Bayanihan Books are royalty free, there is no need for publishers to pay the authors. [...] Furthermore, the Bayanihan Books are licensed using Creative Commons that explicitly allows the use of these materials by any publishers. Therefore, more publishers bidding for the government contract results to more competition and avoids the monopoly of a few big name publishers. [...]

However, the only Creative Commons license I’ve been able to find on the site is a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Philippines License. It would be great if they considered switching to an Attribution, or Attribution-Sharealike license so that the books would be fully open.

It seems as though this is something they’ve already been thinking about:

(Note to self: I need to verify with Atty. Guerrero if printing the textbook constitutes a commercial use and what provisions should be added in our license.)

Anyhow – it looks like an interesting and valuable initiative!

Several of the books on the site’s download site are now available under the GFDL, including:

• Elementary Algebra Lecture Notes
• Precalculus I and II Lecture Notes
• Linear Algebra Notes
• Number Theory Notes

Many thanks, David!

Anti-Copyright @ 1995-2001 by Mauch Publishing Company, un-Incorporated. No rights reserved. Any part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or desecrated without permission.

(Thanks to David Joyner of Open Source Mathematics for this!)

Some of the textbooks listed are explicitly open, but many are made available for non-commercial purposes or don’t have any licensing information.

Here are a few of the open ones:

• A First Course in Linear Algebra by Rob Beezer (University of Puget Sound). GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
• A Problem Course in Mathematical Logic by Stefan Bilaniuk (Trent University). GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
• Measure Theory by D. H. Fremlin (University of Essex). Available under a Design Science License (DSL).
• Introduction to Probability by Charles Grinstead (Swarthmore College) & J. Laurie Snell (Dartmouth College). GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
• Linear Algebra by Jim Hefferon (Saint Michaels College, Vermont). Creative Commons – Attribution ShareAlike (BY-SA).

Many lecture notes by David Santos are available on Open Math Text under the discontinued Open Publication License which is not fully open as it restricts commercial re-use.

There are also many maths textbooks under Creative Commons Non-Commercial and/or No Derivatives licenses – such as Shlomo Sternberg’s books, Dan Sloughter’s calculus texts or Victor Shoup’s A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra.

This looks to suggest that:

1. It is worth chasing up textbook authors to ask them to clarify whether or not their work is open, and to suggest using an explicitly open license if it is. (See Dead knowledge: why being explicit about openness matters for more on this.)
2. It should be made clear that not all Creative Commons licenses are open. (As was commented on in iCommons 2007: Retrospective Reflections.)