Explain this
Vector Calculus
How the publisher describes it:
“This text helps students foster computational skills and intuitive understanding with a careful balance of theory, applications and optional materials. This edition offers revised coverage in several areas and a new section looking at applications to differential geometry, physics and forms of life as well as a large number of new exercises and expansion of the book's historical notes, which help students understand how calculus evolved by profiling important mathematicians. With its contemporary balance between theory, application and historical development the fifth edition gives an insight into how mathematics progresses and is in turn influenced by the natural world.”
Review by Melissa Rodd
In brief:
If you are thinking of doing maths at university or if you are there already, this will be a most useful text book. If you are teaching students who may be going on to further mathematical study, it will be useful to help give them a taste of how A level concepts develop. And, needless to say, it would be a great text for a Vector Calculus course!
“Humour and brief anecdotes help the reader see the human side”
This is an excellent book. It will help you to learn, or to review, vector calculus from the basics through to the most abstract versions of Stokes’ theorem. It is a super textbook that could help a teacher design courses and provide examples, exercises and problems. It would be suitable for A level students studying vectors and three dimensional geometry as well as students at university studying vector calculus itself, or some applications.
The book has a website here giving power-point sets of sides and some 150 pages of additional information.
Why is the book so good?
- It takes each concept thoroughly: rigour and holistic explanation are equally important. If the proof of a particularly complicated theorem would interfere with the flow of the text, then it is referenced in the ‘internet supplement’. There is a sense that helping the student understand is the paramount issue (rather than getting all the theorems down!)
- The authors are experienced university teachers who recognise what students find tricky; their explanations are focused through well-chosen examples. They are also aware of the importance of visualisation in this area of mathematics and use diagrams in an innovative manner to develop learners’ intuitions: they refer to sketches and to other different representations which can be obtained from Computer Algebra Systems that are likely to be available to mathematics undergraduates.
- There are hundreds of exercises designed to develop fluency as well as more challenging problems to test out through understanding of a concept.
- The book is well set out with clear chapter content. Results and definitions are boxed for easy identification.
- The authors are justifiably proud of their historical dimension, new for this edition, which traces the motivations and personalities that have contributed to mathematical progress and culture. Humour and brief anecdotes help the reader see the human side of the mathematical development.
If you are thinking of doing maths at university or if you are there already, this will be a most useful text book. If you are teaching students who may be going on to further mathematical study, it will be useful to help give them a taste of how A level concepts develop. And, needless to say, it would be a great text for a Vector Calculus course!
Melissa Rodd • Centre for Studies in Mathematics and Science Education, University of Leeds
Hardcover: 704 pages
Publisher: W.H.Freeman & Co Ltd; 5th Revised edition edition (1 Sep 2003)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0716749920
ISBN-13: 978-0716749929
Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 19.3 x 3.8 cm
