Applied Mathematics for Business, Economics, Life Sciences, and Social Sciences

Rating:
Summary: excellent book
Review: I used the second edition of this book many years ago in college. Its easy to understand and does a good job of covering its intended subject matter.

Rating:
Summary: A great textbook for end users of mathematics
Review: This book is just very good. It is a top-quality, superbly on target solution for end users of mathematics. I had selected and subsequently used it as a textbook for a freshman calculus course aimed at prospective economics majors at an Ivy League college. My goal was to present a broad scope of the fundamental concepts of applied mathematics relevant to the social sciences, while keeping the exposition at the basic level of mathematical sophistication. Given the objective, one needs a textbook that would replace most proofs with carefully chosen exemplifications, rely on technically undemanding exercises, but enable the teacher to introduce concepts at a lively pace and tie them to interesting applications. This textbook meets all the requirements.

Our course used essentially only the more advanced parts of the book. The selection of topics was systematized by the idea of staying focused on some of the basic mathematical methods designed for solving broadly understood problems of optimization, extrapolation, and prediction. Formally, students were required to learn algorithmic skills, like finding extrema of functions of one and several variables, linear programming, basic routines for ordinary differential equations and Markov chains. Primary emphasis was put on understanding the differences and similarities between continuous and discrete, deterministic and random. The book served us well and we felt truly rewarded by its amazing collection of well selected, well thought-through real-life applications. I am enthusiastic about this book and so were very many of my students.