Select Page

Samizdat Press

Samizdat Press, founded in the 1990’s by John Scales and Martin Smith, is devoted to the free distribution of books, lecture notes and software. The main focus of this archive is on materials of pedagogical nature. If you have anything that you are willing to distribute freely, or would like to support the project, please email Larry Irons or Ilya Tsvankin

All materials at this website are free and may be copied and distributed without permission.

Free Material

Waves and Rays in Elastic Continua by Michael Slawinski

Waves and Rays in Elastic Continua Michael Slawinski Department of Earth Science, Memorial University Newfoundland, Canada mslawins@mac.com This book, which is the second edition of the book published by Elsevier in 2003, emphasizes the interdependence of mathematical...

Theory of Elastic Waves by Gerhard Müller

Theory of Elastic Waves Gerhard Müller Editors Michael Weber - GFZ and Universität Potsdam Georg Rumpker - Universität Frankfurt Dirk Gajewski -  Universiät Hamburg For students with some background in mathematics and theoretical physics this textbook provides the...

Linear Algebra and Multidimensional Geometry by Ruslan Sharipov

Course of Linear Algebra and Multidimensional Geometry Ruslan Sharipov, 5 Rabochaya St., 450003 Ufa, Russia ra_sharipov@lycos.com This is a textbook for the course of multidimensional geometry and linear algebra. This course is a part of the basic mathematical...

Course of Differential Geometry by Ruslan Sharipov

Course of Differential Geometry Ruslan Sharipov, 5 Rabochaya St., 450003 Ufa, Russia ra_sharipov@lycos.com This is a textbook for the basic course of differential geometry. It is recommended as an introductory material for this subject. The PDF file with 15 color...

A Quick Introduction to Tensor Analysis by Ruslan Sharipov

Quick Introduction to Tensor Analysis Ruslan Sharipov, 5 Rabochaya street., 450003 Ufa, Russia R_Sharipov@ic.bashedu.ru I wrote this book in a "do-it-yourself" style so that I give only a draft of tensor theory, which includes formulating definitions and theorems and...

Solving the sealevel equation by Giorgio Spada

Solving the Sealevel Equation Professor Giorgio Spada Istituto di Fisica Universita di Urbino Via Santa Chiara 27 I-61029 Urbino (PU) Italy spada@fis.uniurb.it The sealevel equation allows to compute the sealevel variations induced by surface ice loads, taking into...

The Taboo Post-Glacial Rebound Calculator by Giorgio Spada

The TABOO post-glacial rebound calculator Professor Giorgio Spada Istituto di Fisica Universita di Urbino Via Santa Chiara 27 I-61029 Urbino (PU) Italy spada@fis.uniurb.itf TABOO is a free Fortran 90 code that allows one to compute the general response of a...

Continuum Mechanics by George Backus

The three main sections of the book include: I) an overview of tensors over Euclidean vector spaces (multilinear mappings, definitions of tensors over Euclidean vector spaces, alternating tensors, tensor products, integral calculus of tensors, and integral...

A Genetic Algorithm Tutorial by Darrell Whitley

A Genetic Algorithm Tutorial by Darrell Whitley Computer Science Department Colorado State University. This tutorial covers the canonical genetic algorithm as well as more experimental forms of genetic algorithms, including parallel island models and parallel cellular...

Geodesy and Gravity: Course Notes by John Wahr

Chapters include: observational techniques, physical geodesy, stress/strain relations, potential theory, interpretations of observed gravity anomalies, postglacial rebound, earth tides and earth rotation. Click here to download the table of contents as a postscript...

Theoretical Geomechanics by Marian Ivan

Marian Ivan University of Bucharest Department of Geophysics 6 Traian VUIA str. 70138 BUCHAREST o.p.37 ROMANIA email: ivam@gg.unibuc.ro, ivam@math.math.unibuc.ro The course notes of Marian Ivan from the University of Bucharest, Romania, present some theoretical...

Greek Seismology by Christopher L. Liner

Greek Seismology Being an Annotated Sourcebook of Earthquake Theories and Concepts in Classical Antiquity by Christopher L. Liner, Department of Geosciences, University of Tulsa email WWW Earthquake references abound in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. They...

A simplified introduction to LaTeX by Harvey Greenberg

Professor Harvey J. Greenberg Harvey.Greenberg@cudenver.edu Mathematics Department - Campus Box 170 University of Colorado at Denver PO Box 173364latex Denver, CO 80217-3364 Homepage Complete book (1.2 MB postscript) Table of contents (600 KB postscript)

A Physics Formulary by J.C.A. Wevers

An overview of physics in 100 pages. Mechanics, electricity and magnetism, relativity, oscillations, waves, optics, statistical physics, thermodynamics, transport phenomena, quantum mechanics, plasma physics, solid state physics, group theory, nuclear physics, quantum...

A Surfer’s Guide to Lisp-Stat by John Scales and Martin Smith

This document began life as a quick intro to Lisp-Stat for our book on Geophysical Inverse Theory (a draft of which is available from Samizdat). It expanded last fall when JS taught Object-Oriented Programming to a group of sophomore engineering students at Colorado...

Theory of Seismic Imaging by John Scales

Notes for a graduate course in seismic imaging taught at the Colorado School of Mines. Numerous exercises based on the Center for Wave Phenomena's Seismic Unix free seismic processing package. Last revision January 1997. Postscript copy of the table of contents Unix...

Seismic Wavefields in Layered Isotropic Media by Ilya Tsvankin

The book (course notes) is devoted to asymptotic and numerical analysis of point-source radiation in horizontally layered isotropic media with an emphasis on the physics of wave propagation. Includes a detailed discussion of wave phenomena not accounted for by the...

Uni-Processor Genetic Algorithm by Martin Smith

UGA is an object-oriented genetic algorithm package developed by Martin Smith (martin@blindgoat.org). It implements a multi-population GA on a single processor. In addition there are extensive class libraries which facilitate the development of genetic algorithm...

Other Free Books and Lecture Notes

Albert Tarantola, who passed away in 2009,  had made a number of his books freely available from his webpage, including Elements of Physics and his classic Inverse Problem Theory.

Petr Krysl has released under the GPL his SOFEA Matlab-oriented OO toolkit for finite element analysis. There is a nice book that goes with this too.

Jon Claerbout has all or parts of several of his geophysics books available electronically. Venture west to Stanford University.

This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics  by John Baez, is one of the very best things on the WWW.  Baez also has lots of other interesting works available from his website.  His tutorial on general relativity is superb.

Jim Berryman of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has written Lecture Notes on Nonlinear Inversion and Tomography, which you can download here.

The Free Software Foundation maintains lists of freely accessible books on various topics. Hundreds of non-technical books including many of the great works of literature online from Project Gutenberg.