Customer Reviews

Schaum's Outline of Finite Mathematics

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When you go through the different mathematical Schaum's Outline books, you will see quite a few of the topics get covered in more than one place. For instance, here vectors, matrices, and probability (among other things) are covered here and in their own book. How do you choose? You have to ask yourself how much information you need. This book is not as detailed as others are.

There are lots of solved problems here to help you learn to work the various problems. The explanations are fairly easy to follow. There are also supplementary questions for you to check you knowledge, and the answers are printed at the end of the chapter. You can either work from the answer to the question or work towards the answer from the question, whichever helps you.

A very helpful book, but if you have other books from the series, you may be duplicating topics.

The term "finite mathematics" is one you don't hear too much anymore, because it is too broad of a topic. It usually means either discrete mathematics or an eclectic combination of math topics, including probability and statistics, some graph theory, linear programming, some basic linear algebra, and a bit of calculus, usually intended for business students. This book encompasses the latter definition - it is college level math for business students all the way to the graduate level. The problems are pretty good, and the explanations are good too. The sections on graph theory and game theory are particularly well done and instructive compared to most books. I would say if you are interested in any one of the topics covered in this book in depth, then you should look at the Schaum's outline for that specific topic - in most cases one does exist. However, especially if you are considering in enrolling in the math-intensive field of operations management, you might want to pick up this book as a reference and a self-test. If you can work through the problems in this book, you are probably eminently qualified, at least mathematically, to study operations management.