Numerical Analysis

by Timothy Sauer

Numerical Analysis, Second Edition, is a modern and readable text for the undergraduate audience. This book covers not only the standard topics but also some more advanced numerical methods being used by computational scientists and engineers topics such as compression, forward and backward error analysis, and iterative methods of solving equations all while maintaining a level of discussion appropriate for undergraduates. Each chapter contains a Reality Check, which is an extended exploration of relevant application areas that can launch individual or team projects. MATLAB(r) is used throughout to demonstrate and implement numerical methods. The Second Edition features many noteworthy improvements based on feedback from users, such as new coverage of Cholesky factorization, GMRES methods, and nonlinear PDEs."

Genres: Mathematics

613 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 8, 2013

Reviews

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, the book had a lot of straightforward concepts and for some of the topics, well detailed explanations. The problems were fair in the textbook and gave great practice. But overall, some topics were very confusing and explanations seemed to be very vague or over complicated at times.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Topics are well structured but lack of rigour is very annoying

[Lucm · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is well written. There are plenty of worked examples to illustrate the theory. However, the editing is very bad (2nd edition). The index is so poor it is useless and makes the book a poor reference. It should not be called "index" actually as it is just a reference of words in the text, without any real interest. The index lists all appearances of a set of non-specific math terms, without necessarily any relation to the book topic. On the other hand, the index lacks indexing of important words or abbreviations specific to the topic (like QR factorisation, note that "factorisation" alone is not in the index either, only "factoring", "factoring out" and "factors" are, but they point to the exercises pages or examples, not to the definition or procedure of QR factorisation (which would be the useful references). Besides, the table of content is poor and mentions only the chapters, not the sections (the author is mentioned below each chapter header, as if the book used the wrong book template).

[Josh Ferge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was probably my favorite textbook while in college. It is straight to the point, explains the concepts very well, and gives examples for every type of problem mentioned.