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Handbook of Mathematics and Computational Science

Handbook of Mathematics and Computational Science

List Price: $39.95
Your Price: $34.96
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: excellent complete reference tool for math and computing!
Review: As an engineer I had a formal education in Math, at least in analysis and calculus. That was twenty + years ago, and now that my kids are entering high school I am a little rusted. I found this book to be the answer to many problems. It will not give you demonstrations or explanations but it has the concepts that you need to find the solution of your problem. Case in point. I am currently designing a model airplane. The fuselage sections are composed of a rectangle and a semi ellipse. To find out the shape of the cover on the elliptic part I needed to know the perimeter of an ellipse. I didn't recall the formula, and I found the answer in this book (actually an approximate formula, as there is no analytical solution). This is a must for science or engineering students, and for rusted parents as myself!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Mostly helpful, but incomplete
Review: I think this book is a great reference of mathematics for non-mathematicians, but as a working mathematician I would expect a little more from a book with such a name. I don't say I want a thorough mathematical text, but I'm still waiting for a "mathematics handbook" that includes the Lebesgue mean-value theorem for integrals, or that tells how many abelian groups of order 15 are there, for example.

This book serves pretty fine when you have to give a mathematical advise to a non-mathematician, but when you are working with weakly singular integral operators, for example, it is useless.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Swiss Army Knife of math books
Review: I was still in High School when I bought this book. I thought it could help me somehow with my finals, but I mostly bought it cause after skim reading it in the bookstore, I knew I was gonna need it later on. Surprisingly, it did help on my finals as well. Most of the theory we had to study (apart from proofs of course) was concentrated in a few pages each, so it was easy for me to learn the stuff I really had to remember from there! Later in the summer I read it more carefully, and saw that it was indeed gonna be a big help for my later-on college years! It's condensed, thorough, thus making a great reference guide for everything a college/university student (to give an example) will need!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Swiss Army Knife of math books
Review: The best way I can describe this book is that it is as close to a swiss army knife you are going to find in a mathematics book. It has everything from high school math to math for advanced undergraduates and possibly early graduate school in engineering, physical sciences, economics, and mathematics. It also has a few helpful sections on programming in Fortran, C, Pascal, and C++ (although I wouldn't rely on this book to learn those languages). It is a great reference book for scientists and engineers.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Very comprehensive reference.
Review: This book is great for students and professionals alike.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Useful but limited and *no bibliographies*!
Review: This handbook covers a range of undergraduate applied mathematics. Besides standard topics: geometry, indefinite and definite integrals, linear algebra, complex variables, etc.; it also covers some discrete math: Boolean algebra as applied to digital circuit design, graphs, etc.; and a bit of programming (including written-out programs implementing some algorithms). But its coverage is just too idiosyncratic to rely on. Its treatment of digital logic is surprisingly long, and its treatment of matrices surprisingly short. Why does it mention the rather specialized topics of fuzzy logic and neural networks? Why doesn't it mention wavelets? Why doesn't it include any material and algorithms on strings (regular expression matching, for example)?

But the worst feature of this book is that it doesn't provide bibliographies for the topic it covers. If you need more detailed treatment of matrices or graphs, where should you go for a fuller treatment? It doesn't help at all.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Useful but limited and *no bibliographies*!
Review: This handbook covers a range of undergraduate applied mathematics. Besides standard topics: geometry, indefinite and definite integrals, linear algebra, complex variables, etc.; it also covers some discrete math: Boolean algebra as applied to digital circuit design, graphs, etc.; and a bit of programming (including written-out programs implementing some algorithms). But its coverage is just too idiosyncratic to rely on. Its treatment of digital logic is surprisingly long, and its treatment of matrices surprisingly short. Why does it mention the rather specialized topics of fuzzy logic and neural networks? Why doesn't it mention wavelets? Why doesn't it include any material and algorithms on strings (regular expression matching, for example)?

But the worst feature of this book is that it doesn't provide bibliographies for the topic it covers. If you need more detailed treatment of matrices or graphs, where should you go for a fuller treatment? It doesn't help at all.


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