This volume and its successor were conceived to advance the level of mathematical sophistication in the engineering community, focusing on material relevant to solving the kinds of problems regularly confronted. Volume One's three-part treatment covers mathematical models, probabilistic problems, and computational considerations. Contributors include Solomon Lefschetz, Richard Courant, and Norbert Wiener. 1956 edition.

The international New Math developments between about 1950 through 1980, are regarded by many mathematics educators and education historians as the most historically important development in curricula of the twentieth century. It attracted the attention of local and international politicians, of teachers, and of parents, and influenced the teaching and learning of mathematics at all levels—kindergarten to college graduate—in many nations. After garnering much initial support it began to attract criticism. But, as Bill Jacob and the late Jerry Becker show in Chapter 17, some of the effects became entrenched. This volume, edited by Professor Dirk De Bock, of Belgium, provides an outstanding overview of the New Math/modern mathematics movement. Chapter authors provide exceptionally high-quality analyses of the rise of the movement, and of subsequent developments, within a range of nations. The first few chapters show how the initial leadership came from mathematicians in European nations and in the United States of America. The background leaders in Europe were Caleb Gattegno and members of a mysterious group of mainly French pure mathematicians, who since the 1930s had published under the name of (a fictitious) “Nicolas Bourbaki.” In the United States, there emerged, during the 1950s various attempts to improve U.S. mathematics curricula and teaching, especially in secondary schools and colleges. This side of the story climaxed in 1957 when the Soviet Union succeeded in launching “Sputnik,” the first satellite. Undoubtedly, this is a landmark publication in education. The foreword was written by Professor Bob Moon, one of a few other scholars to have written on the New Math from an international perspective. The final “epilogue” chapter, by Professor Geert Vanpaemel, a historian, draws together the overall thrust of the volume, and makes links with the general history of curriculum development, especially in science education, including recent globalization trends.

Modern Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers is a modern introduction to basic topics in mathematics at the undergraduate level, with emphasis on explanations and applications to real-life problems. There is also an 'Application' section at the end of each chapter, with topics drawn from a variety of areas, including neural networks, fluid dynamics, and the behavior of 'put' and 'call' options in financial markets. The book presents several modern important and computationally efficient topics, including feedforward neural networks, wavelets, generalized functions, stochastic optimization methods, and numerical methods.A unique and novel feature of the book is the introduction of a recently developed method for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), called the unified transform. PDEs are the mathematical cornerstone for describing an astonishingly wide range of phenomena, from quantum mechanics to ocean waves, to the diffusion of heat in matter and the behavior of financial markets. Despite the efforts of many famous mathematicians, physicists and engineers, the solution of partial differential equations remains a challenge.The unified transform greatly facilitates this task. For example, two and a half centuries after Jean d'Alembert formulated the wave equation and presented a solution for solving a simple problem for this equation, the unified transform derives in a simple manner a generalization of the d'Alembert solution, valid for general boundary value problems. Moreover, two centuries after Joseph Fourier introduced the classical tool of the Fourier series for solving the heat equation, the unified transform constructs a new solution to this ubiquitous PDE, with important analytical and numerical advantages in comparison to the classical solutions. The authors present the unified transform pedagogically, building all the necessary background, including functions of real and of complex variables and the Fourier transform, illustrating the method with numerous examples.Broad in scope, but pedagogical in style and content, the book is an introduction to powerful mathematical concepts and modern tools for students in science and engineering.

This monograph presents in great detail a large number of both unpublished and previously published Babylonian mathematical texts in the cuneiform script. It is a continuation of the work A Remarkable Collection of Babylonian Mathematical Texts (Springer 2007) written by Jöran Friberg, the leading expert on Babylonian mathematics. Focussing on the big picture, Friberg explores in this book several Late Babylonian arithmetical and metro-mathematical table texts from the sites of Babylon, Uruk and Sippar, collections of mathematical exercises from four Old Babylonian sites, as well as a new text from Early Dynastic/Early Sargonic Umma, which is the oldest known collection of mathematical exercises. A table of reciprocals from the end of the third millennium BC, differing radically from well-documented but younger tables of reciprocals from the Neo-Sumerian and Old-Babylonian periods, as well as a fragment of a Neo-Sumerian clay tablet showing a new type of a labyrinth are also discussed. The material is presented in the form of photos, hand copies, transliterations and translations, accompanied by exhaustive explanations. The previously unpublished mathematical cuneiform texts presented in this book were discovered by Farouk Al-Rawi, who also made numerous beautiful hand copies of most of the clay tablets. Historians of mathematics and the Mesopotamian civilization, linguists and those interested in ancient labyrinths will find New Mathematical Cuneiform Texts particularly valuable. The book contains many texts of previously unknown types and material that is not available elsewhere.

This book presents a broad selection of articles mainly published during the last two decades on a variety of topics within the history of mathematics, mostly focusing on particular aspects of mathematical practice. This book is of interest to, and provides methodological inspiration for, historians of science or mathematics and students of these disciplines.

Seki was a Japanese mathematician in the seventeenth century known for his outstanding achievements, including the elimination theory of systems of algebraic equations, which preceded the works of Étienne Bézout and Leonhard Euler by 80 years. Seki was a contemporary of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, although there was apparently no direct interaction between them. The Mathematical Society of Japan and the History of Mathematics Society of Japan hosted the International Conference on History of Mathematics in Commemoration of the 300th Posthumous Anniversary of Seki in 2008. This book is the official record of the conference and includes supplements of collated texts of Seki's original writings with notes in English on these texts. Hikosaburo Komatsu (Professor emeritus, The University of Tokyo), one of the editors, is known for partial differential equations and hyperfunction theory, and for his study on the history of Japanese mathematics. He served as the President of the International Congress of Mathematicians Kyoto 1990.