And, it’s over – Springer appears to have shut the gates a day later. Mistake? Buzz-generating marketing ploy? Who knows? I’ll leave the rest of the post intact, but books are no longer free. Some articles are, such as Knuth’s.

All books from Springer that are ten years old or older are free, go look.

Quoting Vít Tuček here, from Facebook (reposted by Pete Shirley):

Springer has made a lot of math & physics books available online, for free! Everything that is more than 10 years old.

If you don’t know which book you may want you can start here http://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/books

This links to the Graduate Texts in Mathematics series: https://t.co/R1EYrTrz5w

This is for all materials (books, journals, chapters, articles) from all fields: http://goo.gl/cB5rRc

This excellent computational geometry book is available (2nd Edition; the latest, 3rd edition costs money), as is this older-but-worthwhile one. For de Berg’s work, the free version is the second edition; other than these errata fixes, the 3rd edition’s major changes are that Chapter 7 includes information on Voronoi diagrams of line-segments and for farthest point, and Chapter 12 includes BSP trees for low-density scenes.

There are also older computer graphics related books, e.g. this one and this. Ancient, but the price is right, and some of this stuff doesn’t change.

Handy list of direct links for the math & physics PDFs here.

Me, I’m digging around for various recreational math books. One of my favorite books, period, is here: One Jump Ahead. There’s a recreational math book, Tracking the Automatic Ant, a collection from the Mathematical Intelligencer. Some bits of newer stuff from the Mathematical Intelligencer is also available, e.g., an article on mathematical vanity plates by Knuth, of all people. Some books I can’t find, as Springer’s searcher is pretty wonky, e.g. The Science of Cooking appears to somehow not exist, though there’s a short article available by the author.

Happy hunting, and email me or let us know in the comments if you find any other gems related to computer graphics.