Customer Reviews

Mathematics of Wave Propagation

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Looking for a self-contained treatise on the mathematics and physics of wave propagation, I bought this book having seen the table of contents and some sample pages. I was particularly interested in the sections on characteristic theory as a basis for solving PDEs in a physically meaningful way. When I received the book it did not disappoint; the subject matter coverage is comprehensive, the layout excellent and easy to follow, with gifted insight demonstrated by the author of the common mathematical threads running through many different physical examples. But afterwards I experienced an extreme let down. As I dipped into several sections to follow the detail, I found far too many errors in the math, not numeric errors but algebraic. This presumably is the author's responsibility, not the editor's. A new edition is urgently required.

I selected this book because of the areas the book covers and the good examples it puts forth to explain the concepts. However, it did not take me long to start to dislike the book due to the enormous amount of math errors in the text. I don't recall a single derivation that does not have at least 2 serious errors in it somewhere, such as incorrect notation, incorrectly stated identities or missing terms in equations. The math errors even spill into the homework making some problems extremely difficult, if not impossible to solve. For a book with this many errors having been published in 2000, there should have been a new edition since then to clean up the mess. As it stands, it is worthless to teach from and absolutely useless to students trying to learn the material for the 1st time. IF you buy this book, do so with the knowledge that you WILL BE deriving or re-deriving everything in the text for yourself.

As an additional note, I requested a copy of the solutions manual from the publisher to see how the author worked some of the problems, but there does not appear to be one. Probably because the author or his grad student couldn't work the problems because of all the errors.