The Nature of Mathematical Modeling Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Basically, this is a great book. I couldn't put down, really. It's sort of a 'everything you always wanted to know about modeling' book, and the author went to great lenghts to compress a huge amount of material in one handsome, managable volume without becoming superficial or less rigorous.
The only thing I'm not happy with is the author's own description of prerequisites: he claims the book is self-contained, and only requires "some calculus and linear algebra". In reality, readers had better be comfortable with complex numbers, operators, coordinate systems, probability theory and various other topics of mathematical physics. And instead of "some" calculus, there is serious calculus involved here. Laplace transforms, the 'del' operator and various other more-or-less advanced topics are presented in the first chapter in a way that suggests the reader's familiarity with them. To those of us that are familiar with these concepts, the book is a delight. To those of us that are not, the book is likely to be too fast-paced and advanced.

Click Here to see more reviews about: The Nature of Mathematical Modeling

This book first covers exact and approximate analytical techniques (ordinary differential and difference equations, partial differential equations, variational principles, stochastic processes); numerical methods (finite differences for ODE's and PDE's, finite elements, cellular automata); model inference based on observations (function fitting, data transforms, network architectures, search techniques, density estimation); as well as the special role of time in modeling (filtering and state estimation, hidden Markov processes, linear and nonlinear time series). Each of the topics in the book would be the worthy subject of a dedicated text, but only by presenting the material in this way is it possible to make so much material accessible to so many people.Each chapter presents a concise summary of the core results in an area, providing an orientation to what they can (and cannot) do, enough background to use them to solve typical problems, and pointers to access the literature for particular applications.

Click here for more information about The Nature of Mathematical Modeling