Customer Reviews

Differential Equations with Mathematica, Second Edition

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

 

 

If you're taking a course in ODEs and your primary text doesn't have some kind of Mathematica supplement, then this book might help you learn to solve differential equations with Mathematica.

However, this book most emphatically is *NOT* a good place to learn diffy Q's if you're a novice or you don't have some other source of instruction. The author tends to dance around from topic to topic a bit much; she frequently presents the "condensed" version of definitions or proofs; and she has a tendency to drop very advanced notions (e.g. nonlinear equations) into the middle of simple discussions without warning. Much of the time, she seems to be assuming that her audience already knows the subject matter, so she can just give a quick sketch of some topic.

This book really doesn't provide enough value to justify its high price.

Abell and Braselton strike a nice balance between the analytical solution of differential equations by hand, and numerical solution by computer. Mathematica is used to simplify some of the details, but they teach how to do everything by hand, including programming runge-kutta solution methods, fourier series, and other topics that lazier authors might have skipped over.

Every chapter starts with basic definitions and builds to useful solution techniques. The book is packed with fully worked examples. My edition is a few years old and talks about the "newly released" Mathematica 3.0, but everything applies just as well to version 4.2.

I am using this book to brush up on the subject. In Chap 2, for instance, I have found a couple of places were the examples using Mathematica and those worked out on paper do not follow each other. Errors generated are shown for some Mathematica examples but not others.
Heavily dependent on using Mathematica to do the legwork, coverage of the basics is sparse.
Not a book for people just starting out learning Differential Equations. I would have rated this book lower if I was depending on it as a textbook or tutorial.

What a great book! I read it at once. I'm a biologist, not a mathematician, but I can ensure that everyone that have access to the Mathematica (TM) program can learn very much about a such not easy subject, also if he/she is a novice about the differential equations. I think this book is a "must have" and I hope to see soon the third Edition. This edition cover Mathematica (TM) 3, but I used it with Mathematica (TM) 4 and I can say it was very good as well. Very nice the CD-ROM enclosed. A great book, thanks to the authors.

This book explains differential equations in a mathematical context rather than simply a "plug and chug" approach. What is particularly good is the section on partial differential equations and their applications. I have used the second edition extensively in my work, and the third edition is even better. The authors are to be congratulated for their clarity in writing.

I was expecting more. The notebooks on CD-ROM were not particularly helpful. All I could do with them was to run the authors's examples. Could not modify them to do my own.

Unless you are a complete novice in the field of differential equations, don't buy this book!