Late last week, we announced the fourth and final text to be accepted in Wave I of our Open Textbook Challenge! Mathematical Analysis I, a text written by the late Elias Zakon of the University of Windsor, was submitted by Dr. Bradley Lucier thanks to a joint effort between Lucier and Zakon’s daughter Tamara Zakon. Mathematical Analysis I will be used as part of the Saylor Foundation’s MA241: Real Analysis I.

Lucier and Tamara Zakon joined forces in 1998 to produce a series of Elias Zakon’s texts for electronic distribution by The Trillia Group, which is an Internet publisher Lucier established “to provide quality texts distributed at the lowest cost to the widest audience.”

Lucier told the Saylor Foundation that “Elias Zakon worked much of his professional life polishing his series of three texts on Mathematical Analysis, a series that was never published in his lifetime but was copied and distributed to students at the University of Windsor. I think Professor Zakon would have been thrilled to see the Saylor Foundation make it possible to distribute freely to students around the world this second volume in the series.”

The text joins three additional texts – Elementary Linear Algebra, Linear Algebra, and Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice – that were accepted under Wave I of the Challenge: all four textbooks are now available to students and educators around the globe for free on www.saylor.org.

If you missed out on the press release emailed out last week, you can read the full announcement here. (Haven’t signed up for our mailing list? Click here to do so now!) And, if you’ve written a textbook or course materials – or know someone that has – check out our Open Textbook Challenge page. We’ve extended the Wave II deadline and will now be accepting texts through May 31, 2012!

The image used in this post came from Flickr user shutterhacks and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.