Customer Reviews

Applied Partial Differential Equations (Dover Books on Mathematics)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kudos to Dover for bringing this book back in print. We used
this book in a partial differential equations course at the
University of Pittsburgh a year ago. Unfortunately, the book
was out-of print then, and we had to use photocopies of the
original Harper & Row edition. (and the school bookstore charged
us about twice the $$ as the Dover edition costs.) The text
begins with the heat equation, and then progresses to more
complicated PDEs. The nice thing is that discrete methods are

introduced right from the start. I remember having a lot of fun
plugging discrete solutions of PDEs into Microsoft Excel and
seeing what the solutions looked like. The chapter on Fourier
Series is good, generalized Fourier series are covered, and
you will learn concepts such as pointwise and uniform convergen-
ce. Following that, there is a chapter on boundary-value
problems which covers Dirichlet, Neumann and Sturm-Liouville
problems. For both Cartesian and curvilinear coordinates. I
can't tell you what is in the later chapters, but if the rest
of the book is like the first three chapters, then it is a great
book, well worth the money.

Everybody out there thinking of writing an Applied PDE textbook should just forget it, you're wasting your time... we already have a perfectly good one: it's here, and it's under $20. Comprehensive, understandable and way ahead of its time in appreciating the importance of numerical methods. With copious examples and stacks of problems, it's good as both a learning and a reference text. The only bad things I can find are a few typos in the finite difference chapters. Outstanding job.

This book is very well written and is worth every penny I paid for it. The authors are very clear,concise and understand the reader. The only drawback is that their Schaum's
Outline has the Finite Element Method, but this book, as detailed as it is, has for some reason omitted it. With that said, I still think the book is very well priced.

Not very special book, but a beautiful price. Down the
line the goal is FEM, but it review different types of
equations with some mathematical rigor and physical
insight.