Reviews for Nonlinear Physics with Mathematica for Scientists and Engineers

The average rating for Nonlinear Physics with Mathematica for Scientists and Engineers based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-11-14 00:00:00 Max Bohnenkamp My white whale. I insisted I read this book cover to cover, and it took me much longer than I originally planned, I was so excited when I finally finished it. This was the perfect book at the perfect time for me. I'm working on my PhD, and my primary areas of interest for research are things like approximation algorithms, metaheuristics, and the like. This is a pretty wide net, and I wasn't familiar with everything in it, but I needed to understand a lot of background material. I couldn't even really read papers because, one, there would be too many to read, two, it would be too hard to find the "originals" for any given topic, and three, I lacked enough background material that I could barely understand a lot of the papers anyway. As I was trying to narrow down my research topic, I was beginning to feel overwhelmed, drowning in a sea of information, and ill-equipped to swim to shore myself. Then I discovered this book, which distilled the entire huge area into a single volume. Covering not only the basics, but the current (as of 2004) state of things as well. It was the exact book I needed, and I'm incredibly glad someone wrote it. The book is very well-written. It's clearly intended for students, in fact the author even claims its for undergraduate students (I was never exposed to this kind of stuff as an undergrad). I think it suffers from the problem that a lot of computer science textbooks suffer from, which is a general overreliance on notation to convey ideas. Missing or misremembering what a particular mathematical symbol or letter stands for makes it difficult to understand, and I generally prefer when texts, especially those written for students, provide prose explanations immediately before or after a section of heavy notation. Algorithmics for Hard Problems does a semi-decent job of this, but more often than not relies on pure notation. The main reason I docked this otherwise excellent book by a star is it does a thing that I find more and more computer science textbooks doing when they are "overview" style books, meaning that they cover a wide selection of material rather than diving deep into a few specific things. I call it "Chapter 0", largely because many of these books also refer to it as Chapter 0. It's a single, extremely long chapter at the beginning of the book providing all of the "background material" for the rest of the book. Definitions, terms, notation, problem definitions and abbreviations, whatever the author(s) do not feel like discussing in the book proper, it just gets crammed in here. I hate Chapter 0. Reading Chapter 0 from beginning to end is a non-starter for any student wanting to learn from the book, because it's pages upon pages (in this case, 134 pages) of material not directly relevant to the topic of the book, which is insanely boring. Moreover, it's impossible to remember so much densely packed information, so reading it isn't even terribly useful. Instead then, readers (like me) will skip this chapter and begin reading once the actual book starts. But then, you're immediately confronted with notation and terminology you don't understand. This forces you to flip to the index, try to find the first occurence of the thing, flip back to Chapter 0 in the right place, and read up. A section heavy with this kind of thing will require flipping between pages dozens upon dozens of times, it's extremely irritating. What I would prefer is for Chapter 0 to be spread throughout the book. Eliminate it. Then, the first time in the book something is referenced which would be in Chapter 0, instead create a sidebar-style box giving the background information right then and there. Readers familiar with it already can skip right over because it is visually distinctive, but other readers can have it explained right there where they need it. At the very least, if you're going to have a Chapter 0, directly reference page numbers as a footnote or a parenthetical when material from it is referenced in the book proper, to avoid the index-search. Many textbooks do this, so I can't blame this book too much because it's something of a standard, but I still hate it and won't give a book 5 stars if it does it. Otherwise, this book is excellent, extremely informative and well-written. If you're into this material, I'd say that "Handbook of Approximation Algorithms" is actually a bit better-written, in the sense that it's very, very conversational and aimed at students, but that this book is much shorter and a bit less holistic, and therefore a better "cover-to-cover" book (whereas Handbook is a better reference in a lot of ways).

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-27 00:00:00 Daryl St. Laurent An exceptional textbook for computer science. This is not among the very popular titles on the subject, but one of the best.