Triangulations and Applications (Mathematics and Visualization) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is an outstanding book. It is clearly written and goes into great detail. There is source code available that is very well designed and clearly commented. (search for Triangulation Template Library) There are ample illustrations to help you visualize the algorithms.
It is a short book but very complete. It has an academic flavor with definitions, theorems, lemmas and extensive references. There are exercises at the end of the chapters so it was designed to be useful as a textbook for a college computer science course.
I bought it to learn the algorithms and techniques on my own, with an eye toward applying them in geometric modeling for computer games. I found it easy to follow and skipped many of the proofs on the first reading. There are several code snippets throughout the text, some are give in pseudo-code and other are C++. They use OpenGL and GLUT to demonstrate the use of the library. The triangulation library is C++ and not directly tied to OpenGL and should be applicable to Direct3D or other graphics APIs.

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This book will serve as a valuable source of information about triangulations for the graduate student and researcher. With emphasis on computational issues, it presents the basic theory necessary to construct and manipulate triangulations. In particular, the book gives a tour through the theory behind the Delaunay triangulation, including algorithms and software issues. It also discusses various data structures used for the representation of triangulations.

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Monte Carlo Simulation in Statistical Physics Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a nice little book written by two experts of the field. This edition is only an expanded version of earlier editions (by addition of two new chapters, the core of the book chapter 1 to 3 hasn't change at all). The book covers monte carlo techniques through various well-known examples (Ising model, random walk, percolation, self-avoiding random walk). I enjoyed reading the first 3 chapters of the book. In particular, chapter 3 guides the readers and gives them the chance to practice what they should have learned in previous chapter (through 53 exercises). The following 2 chapters (chapter 4 and 5) are not as nicely written. Moreover, there are some serious shortcoming in the book. (1) All codes are written in Fortran. While everyone who can program can easily understand the codes, Fortran belongs to the past and could have been ok for physics students during late 80's (first edition) but not for those at 2006. (2) The guide (chapter 3) should have been the last chapter and have covered subjects in chapters 4 and 5 (3) As I mentioned before, chapter 4 and 5 are not well-organized. (4) The book in general stresses too much on finite-size effects. However, it is an important subject and it tells us how we can scale our simulation result to more realistic cases. By my judgement, the book gives wrong impression about the degree of its importance.
I recommend graduate students who are serious about learning monte carlo methods to read Newman and Barkema book (Monte Carlo Methods in Statistical Physics) instead since it provides a broader view about the subject. Although I highly recommend those who are interested in the subject to go through chapter 3. It is fun and very instructive.


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Monte Carlo Simulation in Statistical Physics deals with the computer simulation of many-body systems in condensed-matter physics and related fields of physics, chemistry and beyond, to traffic flows, stock market fluctuations, etc.). Using random numbers generated by a computer, probability distributions are calculated, allowing the estimation of the thermodynamic properties of various systems. This book describes the theoretical background to several variants of these Monte Carlo methods and gives a systematic presentation from which newcomers can learn to perform such simulations and to analyze their results. This fourth edition has been updated and a new chapter on Monte Carlo simulation of quantum-mechanical problems has been added. To help students in their work a special web server has been installed to host programs and discussion groups (http://wwwcp.tphys.uni-heidelberg.de). Prof. Binder was the winner of the Berni J. Alder CECAM Award for Computational Physics 2001.

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Dynamic General Equilibrium Modeling: Computational Methods and Applications Review

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(More customer reviews)If you want to learn how to solve the dynamic macroeconomic models from a theoretical and practical perspectives, you should buy this book. But what I like the most it's the extended development in each model, contrary to other macroeconomic books, you can find in this one, a very detailed explanation of the algebra inside the macro models. Maybe next editions could improve with the answer to each chapter problems in some web page.

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Modern business cycle theory and growth theory uses stochastic dynamic general equilibrium models. In order to solve these models, economists need to use many mathematical tools. This book presents various methods in order to compute the dynamics of general equilibrium models. In part I, the representative-agent stochastic growth model is solved with the help of value function iteration, linear and linear quadratic approximation methods, parameterised expectations and projection methods. In order to apply these methods, fundamentals from numerical analysis are reviewed in detail. In particular, the book discusses issues that are often neglected in existing work on computational methods, e.g. how to find a good initial value.In part II, the authors discuss methods in order to solve heterogeneous-agent economies. In such economies, the distribution of the individual state variables is endogenous. This part of the book also serves as an introduction to the modern theory of distribution economics. Applications include the dynamics of the income distribution over the business cycle or the overlapping-generations model.In an accompanying home page to this book, computer codes to all applications can be downloaded.

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