# Book/tutorial recommendations: acquiring math-oriented reading proficiency in German

I'm interested in others' suggestions/recommendations for resources to help me acquire reading proficiency (of current math literature, as well as classic math texts) in German.

I realize that German has evolved as a language, so ideally, the resource(s) I'm looking for take that into account, or else perhaps I'll need a number of resources to accomplish such proficiency. I suspect I'll need to include multiple resources (in multiple forms) in my efforts to acquire the level of reading proficiency I'd like to have.

I do like "hard copy" material, at least in part, from which to study. But I'm also very open to suggested websites, multimedia packages, etc.

In part, I'd like to acquire reading proficiency in German to meet a degree requirement, but as a native English speaker, I would also like to be able to study directly from significant original German sources.

Finally, there's no doubt that a sound/solid reference/translation dictionary (or two or three!) will be indispensable, as well. Any recommendations for such will be greatly appreciated, keeping in mind that my aim is to be proficient in reading mathematically-oriented German literature (though I've no objections to expanding from this base!).

• Leo is a very good and mostly reliable online dictionary (German/English/French/Spanish/Italian/Chinese/Russian) I can only vouch for the first four and I'm rather happy with the results. Mathematical words are not covered very well, though.
– t.b.
Jun 19, 2011 at 16:49
• There is also a new sister-forum exclusively for German: german.stackexchange.com - it is not exclusively for math-oriented German but there are many well qualified persons that are eager to answer your questions (me included :-) Jun 21, 2011 at 6:58
• There's this book by Schubert Topology g.co/kgs/rj3PnT. A friend gave it to me at Berkeley. I enjoyed reading it a little bit; and eventually passed the German language exam for the Ph d program at ucla... of course, i also took two semesters of german... and travelled to Germany...
– user403337
Aug 10, 2018 at 22:37

Landau's Grundlagen der Analysis in the AMS edition comes with a "complete German-English vocabulary", this sounds ideal for your purposes.

• This does sound good: the math review even mentions it is targeted to beginning readers of mathematical German: ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=109776 Jun 19, 2011 at 17:38
• Eine gute empfehlung Mar 13 at 0:37

After searching in google books I found a book called German-English Mathematical Vocabulary. It appears to be out of print but nevertheless can be bought used for just a few dollars in Amazon.

I just checked my University library and they have it so tomorrow I will check it out to see what it has to offer. I will report back after looking at the book to add something about it.

Also this German-English math dictionary might be useful, it even comes with links to the corresponding Wikipedia articles for each concept.

Hope this helps.

• It seems that the second link isn't working at the moment, here is a Wayback Machine. I searched a bit, but I did not find whether this dictionary was moved to some other URL. May 15 at 8:40

I find it helpful to translate papers I sort of know and still care about. If you have a favorite course you've taken and understood, get a german textbook for the course and translate a section or work some of the exercises. If you type up the exercises, make sure to type up the original question in German and English (and your answer in English).

If you like algebra, and you might try one of the algebra books on SpringerLink.

If you like solving exercises, then you can just go to course webpages and download their homework. For instance: algebraic number theory I, linear algebra, etc.

• These are great suggestions..."Go directly to the source, so to speak," (and extend my familiarity with English to German...). Nice. Jun 19, 2011 at 17:42
• The link to the search query at springerlink.com is dead, since the domain has moved to link.springer.com. Perhaps the following search query is a sufficient replacement for the dead URL: link.springer.com/… May 19 at 23:53

I realize this is a bit late, but I just saw by chance that the math department of Princeton has a list of German words online, seemingly for people who want to read German math papers.

• Really, a poor collection:) Jan 29, 2018 at 22:00

Just for looking up German-English vocabulary in particular for math terms, I would recommend dict.cc. I use it the same way: German -> English.

If your focus includes number theory, then Landau's classic Handbuch Der Lehre Von Der Verteilung Der Primzahlen is an excellent choice. You can easily find a hard copy and/or read it online, for example, at University of Michigan Historical Math Collection