Choice Review

Riley is a physicist and senior tutor at Clare College, Cambridge, UK; Hobson is an astrophysicist and university reader at the Cavendish Laboratory, UK; and Bence is a postdoctoral researcher at the Cavendish Laboratory. Their new edition (1st ed., CH, Sep'98, 36-0386; 2nd ed., 2002) is a compendium of undergraduate mathematics for students of physics and engineering. It includes algebra, calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, complex variables, tensors, numerical methods, group theory, probability, and statistics. Each of these topics could easily require a separate course and book of several hundred pages. Although this book is more than 1,300 pages long, the authors attempt to cover so much material that the presentation is necessarily simplified. In places, the mathematics is oversimplified to the point that it is arguably incorrect. For example, in a discussion of the method of Lagrange multipliers for constrained optimization problems, the authors fail to note the need for constraint qualification in problems with multiple constraints. Similarly, in their discussion of the LU factorization, the authors fail to mention the need for partial pivoting. Although some readers might find this to be an accessible resource, most readers would be better served by other works. ^BSumming Up: Not recommended. B. Borchers New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology