Customer Reviews

NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions

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Almost everyone who works with special mathematical functions will have had reason to profit from the 1960's classic Abramowitz and Stegun. The NIST Handbook takes all the useful stuff from A&S (leaving out all the tables of values which are now of little use), and adds the extra knowledge accumulated during the last 50 years of numerical and analytic research. The NIST Handbook will be indispensable to all those applying mathematics to technical subjects.

The new NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions began as a project in 1996, culminating in the publication of the Handbook in 2010. As a successor to another classic -- Abramowitz & Stegun -- much was expected, and has been delivered. Compared to the original, the overall style is similar, yet somehow the presentation appears to be less telegraphic, even though it is clearly meant to be used as a reference. The graphics are much improved and the sections on computation methods provide useful references (the use of tables, now obselete, has been dispensed with). There are also some relatively unique contributions (e.g., the chapter on integrals with coalescing saddles). Finally, one must also mention the Handbook's Web companion, the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF; [...]), containing even more information and packed with extra resources (Handbook errata, hyperlinks, downloads, LaTeX encodings). The editors and the mathematicians who labored over the Handbook and the DLMF deserve all of our praise and gratitude.

This book in its new form has become a very valuable and indispensable to any researcher in mathematics, especially in the field of special functions. It is one of the books that does not leave my office, as well its electronic version on my personal computer. It really guides me in all of my lectures, as well as a basic reference in all my research.