Customer Reviews

Introduction to Bessel Functions (Dover Books on Mathematics)

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

 

 

My first exposure to Bessel functions was while I was doing an internship and I was attempting to simulate radar imaging on a spherical target. The gentleman that I was studying under had previously written this code in Matlab, and I was attempting to translate it to C++. I purchased this book with the hope that it would help me obtain a better knowledge base to tackle this problem. It didn't.

Later, I took a graduate math course in special functions (Green's Functions, Fourier Transforms, Legendre Polynomials, and Bessel Functions). Although this course was extremely challenging, I found that the examples given in Bowman's text were perfect for the segment of the course that was devoted to Bessel Functions, and it helped me raise my grade on homeworks.

In the end, the book is strictly about Bessel Functions. There is hardly any background (page 1 begins right away with Bessel Functions of zero order). The book progresses linearly with the most basic Bessel Functions, a few examples, and eventually ends with Bessel Functions of any real order and a few applications.

I think this book acutally fulfil the the titles it named. An "introduction ot the bessel functions, ." I have read other books on so called introduction ot certain subjects , say Riemann's Zeta Function, but actually the book is as difficult as a treatise book on that subject. In this book, the author acutually doing the good work. From the beginning, he defined
the bessel function of order zero as a power series, Don't ask why, just accept the facts. Then he gradually presents more facts about Bessel functions without rigorous proof. That is good!! Before mastering the subject, just accept the facts and in the future, if you want to know more about Bessel functions, you have already have a certain background knowledge about that.
If you read Watson's timeless classic " teatise on "bessel function", not only you will get stucked and you may lose interest to that as well. So I think this is the best book for those mathematicians or engineers who would encounter bessel function. I really have a lot of fun in reading this book !

As did someone in a previous review, I bought this book for a bit of help in an advanced graduate-level math class. This book provides a lot of Bessel function examples. It really is a problem-based text with tons of pertinent examples. Most of my learning was done by reading/trying the examples and then relating them to homework problems.