About ReadTheMasters

It seems to me that if one wants to make progress in mathematics, one should study the masters, not the pupils. — Niels Henrik AbelMémoires de Mathématiques par N. H. Abel, Paris, 9 August 1826, in the margin of p. 79 (Ms.fol.351 A, National Library of Norway).

Original French: Au reste il me paraît que si l’on veut faire des progrès dans les mathématiques il faut étudier les maîtres et non pas les écoliers.

ReadTheMasters publishes AI transcriptions and translations of landmark public-domain mathematics and physics texts, rendered as clean LaTeX, with the original source always cited.

Our goals:

• Revive historic works as faithful, reusable LaTeX transcriptions and readable translations.
• Keep the whole corpus open (CC0).

We publish only public-domain texts — verified by an automated, sourced copyright check that applies both the author’s-death rule (life + 70) and the US 95-year publication rule.

Every text carries a quality status — from AI draft (machine output, not yet human-checked) through skimmed (a quick pass) to verified (a full, rigorous check against the source) — and records which AI model produced it. Nothing hides how it was made.

The project is community-powered: contributors make their own transcriptions and translations and submit them for review. See Contribute.