The Nature of Mathematical Modeling
Editorial Reviews
Review
'Simulation and mathematical modelling will power the 21st century the way steam powered the 19th. Gershenfeld masterfully compresses two armloads of dense textbooks into a single clear volume, including both classic and avant garde methods, and with well-selected references for further study. Every student of computing needs this book as the entry ticket into a vital and rapidly-changing field.' William H. Press, Harvard University, author of Numerical Recipes
'Reducing whole disciplines to 10 pages or so of essential ideas makes for a remarkable guidebook. Virtually every present-day technique for modeling systems is displayed, like so many tools hung on a pegboard ... anyone who wants a sense of how the language of mathematics has changed in the last 50 years will marvel at Gershenfeld's concise map.' The Boston Globe
'In a compact but accessible manner, Gershenfeld offers a wide-ranging overview of mathematical ideas and techniques that provide a number of effective approaches to problem solving ... The Nature of Mathematical Modeling is a great compendium of techniques. It should be kept within easy reach of anyone who wants to build computer models to help understand the world around us.' Science
Book Description
This book first covers exact and approximate analytical techniques (ordinary differential and difference equations, partial differential equations, variational principles, stochastic processes); numerical methods (finite differences for ODE's and PDE's, finite elements, cellular automata); model inference based on observations (function fitting, data transforms, network architectures, search techniques, density estimation); as well as the special role of time in modeling (filtering and state estimation, hidden Markov processes, linear and nonlinear time series). Each of the topics in the book would be the worthy subject of a dedicated text, but only by presenting the material in this way is it possible to make so much material accessible to so many people. Each chapter presents a concise summary of the core results in an area, providing an orientation to what they can (and cannot) do, enough background to use them to solve typical problems, and pointers to access the literature for particular applications.
The Nature of Mathematical Modeling,Neil Gershenfeld,Cambridge University Press,0521570956,Applied,Mathematical Models,Mathematics,Physics,Science/Mathematics,Mathematical modelling,Mathematics / General
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