Once again keeping a keen ear to the needs of the evolving calculus community, Stewart created this text at the suggestion and with the collaboration of professors in the mathematics department at Texas A&M University. With an early introduction to vectors and vector functions, the approach is ideal for engineering students who use vectors early in their curriculum. Stewart begins by introducing vectors in Chapter 1, along with their basic operations, such as addition, scalar multiplication, and dot product. The definition of vector functions and parametric curves is given at the end of Chapter 1 using a two-dimensional trajectory of a projectile as motivation. Limits, derivatives, and integrals of vector functions are interwoven throughout the subsequent chapters. As with the other texts in his Calculus series, in Early Vectors Stewart makes us of heuristic examples to reveal calculus to students. His examples stand out because they are not just models for problem solving or a means of demonstrating techniques - they also encourage students to develop an analytic view of the subject. This heuristic or discovery approach in the examples give students an intuitive feeling for analysis.
James Stewart received the M.S. degree from Stanford University and the Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. After two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of London, he became Professor of Mathematics at McMaster University. His research has been in harmonic analysis and functional analysis. Stewart's books include a series of high school textbooks as well as a best-selling series of calculus textbooks. He is also co-author, with Lothar Redlin and Saleem Watson, of a series of college algebra and precalculus textbooks. Translations of his books include those in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Greek, and Indonesian.
A talented violinst, Stewart was concertmaster of the McMaster Symphony Orchestra for many years and played professionally in the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra. Having explored connections between music and mathematics, Stewart has given more than 20 talks worldwide on Mathematics and Music and is planning to write a book that attempts to explain why mathematicians tend to be musical.
Stewart was named a Fellow of the Fields Institute in 2002 and was awarded an honorary D.Sc. in 2003 by McMaster University. The library of the Fields Institute is named after him. The James Stewart Mathematics Centre was opened in October, 2003, at McMaster University.
