“...Strang's book is an elegant masterpiece. As a former college math major and current University science professor who uses computation daily in research, this is the best general 'applied math' book I've ever seen. I highly recommend it to every graduate student and postdoc who passes through my lab. It is not a textbook in the usual sense, and is thus very different from Strang's much more widely known linear algebra texts. The level of the book is very mixed; parts are very elementary, and other sections really require advanced graduate background to fully comprehend. The book is 'modern' in every sense, full of opinions and marvelous insights, and even very witty in places. As one example, the book completely skips the series solutions to the diffusion equation (about which most 'applied math' books drone on for far too many pages) and cuts right to the Gaussian kernel solution. The discussion of Fourier analysis is fresh and excellent. The grouping of many ideas under the umbrella of 'approach to equilibrium' and 'minimum principles' is a superior organization. There are many other modernisms like these.... too many to count. Just from reading the preface, you can tell that this book was a labor of love for Strang, and it needs to be taken as such. Do not buy this book to cram for an exam -- buy it, and refer back to it often, to really learn modern applied math.”
--From a review on amazon.com, Jay Ponder, St. Louis, MO, September 18, 2000

About the Author

Gilbert Strang is a Professor of Mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, of the University of Oxford, UK. His current research interests include linear algebra, wavelets and filter banks, applied mathematics, and engineering mathematics. He is the author or co-author of six textbooks and has published a monograph with George Fix titled “An Analysis of the Finite Element Method.” Professor Strang served as SIAM’s president from 1999-2000, chaired the US National Committee on Mathematics from 2003–2004, and won the Neumann Medal of the US Association of Computational Mechanics in 2005. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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