This book introduces numerical methods, emphasizing the practical aspects of their use and establishing their limitations, advantages and disadvantages. It is intended to assist future as well as practicing engineers in fully understanding the fundamentals of numerical methods, most notably their application, limitations and potentials.
Bilal M. Ayyub is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the director of the Center for Technology and Systems Management (CTSM) at the A. James Clark School of Engineering. Ayyub has been at the University of Maryland since 1983. He is a leading authority in the areas of risk analysis, uncertainty modeling, decision analysis, and systems engineering. Ayyub is also the president of BMA Engineering, Inc., a Bethesda, Maryland-based engineering consulting firm that works with infrastructure and defense systems.
Ayyub is a multiple recipient of the ASNE Jimmie Hamilton Award for the best papers in the Naval Engineers Journal in 1985, 1992, 2000 and 2003. Also, he received the ASCE Outstanding Research Oriented Paper in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management for 1987, the ASCE Edmund Friedman Award in 1989, the ASCE Walter Huber Research Prize in 1997, and the K. S. Fu Award of NAFIPS in 1995. He received the Department of the Army Public Service Award in 2007 for leading the development of the risk model for the hurricane protection system of New Orleans. Ayyub was appointed to many national committees and investigation boards including most recently on the working group on higher education of the transition team of Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, 2006-07, the working group on homeland security of the transition team of Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, 2006-07, and the Committee for Assessment of the Bureau of Reclamation's Security Program, Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, National Research Council of the National Academies, 2006-08. He was appointed to the Maryland Governor's Commission on Middle Eastern American Affairs, and on the Board of Advisors of the ASCE Council on Disaster Risk Management(CDRM). Presently, he chairs the CDRM Vulnerability and Risk Committee. He has delivered many invited talks at leading national and international organizations including most recently a distinguished lecture to the Brazilian Research Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, Naval War College for the Chief of Naval Operations, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Australian National Marine Safety Committee.
Ayyub is the author and co-author of more than 550 publications in journals and conference proceedings, and reports. Among the publications of Ayyub are more than 20 books.
