Excursions in Modern Mathematics, Fifth Edition

Rating:
Summary: A Great Textbook
Review: I teach a university course based on this textbook and I really like it. It is full of mathematics that students can apply readily to everyday situations, without being heavily computational. The problem sets are relevant to the chapter text. Also, the problem sets are divided into three categories ("walking", "jogging", and "running") based on the level of thought that must go into them. The four chapters on statistics and probability are not quite what I'd like them to be, because in my opinion they cover too much statistical ground in hardly any depth. They would be better if they just did some basic statistics and didn't try to get students at this level into normal curves and standard deviations and all that. My students are particularly fond of the graph theory unit (chapters 5-8). In fact, their only complaint of the book so far is the high price.