Encounters with Chaos [Hardcover]

Denny Gulick (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0070252033 | ISBN-13: 978-0070252035 | Publication Date: January 1, 1992 | Edition: First Edition

This text on the increasingly popular topic of chaos is accessible to a varied undergraduate audience. Gulick is co-author of a successful calculus book and is an excellent expositor. His recent interest in teaching chaotic dynamical systems to undergraduates produced a set of class notes that developed into this text.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies; First Edition edition (January 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070252033
• ISBN-13: 978-0070252035
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,277,204 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic Resource for Undergraduates, February 22, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Encounters with Chaos (Hardcover)

Denny Gulick opens here a direct access to the mathematical technics for understanding chaotic phenomena. Any undergraduate with some pre or calculus knowledge, little algebra and very few differential equations (rich introductions to these topics are included in every chapter)can access the basics of this growing "Chaos Theory", that is beeing applied to dynamics in all fields. Professor Gulick makes an outstanding aproach with this book. He makes accesible this field to beginners, self-students or newcomers to mathematics, covering so a huge gap in the literature. It is full of examples, detailed exercises and explained in a very comprehensible and student-friendly way, without losing rigour and technic. It has a companion booklet to order separately that includes "all the solutions to the exercises, done step by step and a true Basic software for Pcs or Macs.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not too bad, May 2, 2001

By 

Jihwan Myung (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Encounters with Chaos (Hardcover)

In the field of chaotic dynamics, does there exist _the_ standard textbook for undergrads? I think not. Still, in most colleges, _chaos_ is a subtopic you briefly go through (most of the time just `skipped' through) while studying differential equations, mathematical physics or classical physics. To be competely honest, my impression is that those ``subtopics'' usually don't make a good intro to chaotic dynamics, either. I have read some textbooks targeted at undergraduates and Gulick's was not too bad to skim through what we have in chaotic dynamics. However, Gulick pays too much attention on the basics (analysis and differential equations) and this may seem such a waste of space given the limited number of pages (some two hundreds). Naturally, his explanations are not detailed and gives the impression that things are done rather hastily. But, I must say, this book is superier to some other books that spends time neither on the basics nor the analytic aspects of chaotic dynamics.

5.0 out of 5 stars Rigorous, concise and accessible, September 2, 2011

By 

Peter Mills - See all my reviews

This review is from: Encounters with Chaos (Hardcover)

In short, everything that a textbook should be. Granted, I had a very good professor who explained the concepts well, but it follows that he would choose a good textbook. Takes a pure mathematics approach with a strong emphasis on proofs and iterated function maps, rather than applications and differential equations. Nonetheless, the text is extremely accessible and should be understandable to most people with only a minimum (first year) of university-level mathematics, or even to a determined highschool graduate.