Numerical Methods Using MATLAB

by Kurtis D. Fink and John H.; Fink Kurtis D. Mathews

Book Overview

This book provides a fundamental introduction to numerical analysis. KEY TOPICS: This book covers numerous topics including Interpolation and Polynomial Approximation, Curve Fitting, Numerical... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0132700425
• ISBN13: 9780132700429
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 662 Pages
• Weight: 1.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Satisfactory, but with flaws

The Math Part: I have to use this as the main text for a college math class, and while it may be a good reference book or engineering text, I don't think it's the best choice for a math course. It's written in such a way that you can flip to the section/topic you need and immediately get the main points and the formulas. But the authors don't necessarily teach their materials in the most intuitive way and frankly, don't seem that concerned with intuition at all. This makes the book quite sufficient as reference for your computations in your bioinformatics research project and such, but for a math text I would be more interested in really owning the intuition and tricky ideas so I can generalize to new cases or derive the formulas, rather than discovering 20 gazillion technical details/equations that will magically spew out an answer for who knows what reason. See the bajillion formulas on cubic splines for what I mean. Or see how instead of simple example + intuition, the authors chose to do 20 pages demonstrating Gaussian elimination. The Matlab Part: I learned Matlab in a few weeks from "Mastering MATLAB 7" and playing around with it on my own. It's very easy to just use the built-in manual or find all kinds of solutions to common problems using Google. There's really nothing wrong or tedious with picking up Matlab knowledge "from the manuals, man pages, the Internet, etc..." as one reviewer complained, because a language is necessarily something you pick up gradually and continually. Personally I think the reviewer was misleading in implying that this book does a good job teaching beginners Matlab. There's 1-2 programs per section, and no explanations in terms of the programming. Honestly, what are the chances that these programs will just drop into your lap and fit perfectly whatever application it is that you presumably need these numerical methods for? You will need to tailor the programs to your objectives or at least, understand WHY and HOW they work, in order to really take advantage of them, and that is outside the scope of this book. What this book really offers are the algorithms behind the programs, and not the programs themselves that are useful. In my opinion the Matlab programs were just a selling point, that's all. There were also lots of little things that I personally just did not like about the book, where I felt the authors cut corners in their explanations or didn't phrase certain things in the best ways or used slightly funky notation or were not organized enough. Not a great math book in my opinion. But objectively speaking most people probably don't mind those kinds of details and aren't necessarily looking for a math book. So with that in mind I give it a 4.

A decent textbook without unnecessary clutter

This book goes straight to the heart of the numerical methods without unnecessary distracting fancy pictures and layout that some numerical methods textbook for engineers have. Also, the book has enough Matlab programs for a reader/student to understand essentials of Matlab programming and then tweak/modify the programs for further applications. I wish author incorporates numerical methods for nonlinear ODE boundary value problems and eigenvalue problems related to ODE in the future edition. Overall, it is an excellent introductory numerical methods textbook for science and engineering students. After grasping the fundamentals in this textbook, student/reader will tend to be more confident and enthusiastic while studying Numerical Analysis.

Much needed book

Whether you are an instructor for an Engineering class, Life Sciences, Statistics, Mathematics, or simply want to add practical mathematical analysis and programming, this book is the book you should use. I have been using Matlab for a number of years, and I had to pick up my Matlab knowledge from the manuals, man pages, the Internet, etc... and finding out the ins and outs of how to do something was not always an easy task nor accurate. Mathews and Fink's book put all you need to know about the most popular Mathematical methods at your finger tips. The book is tailored such that it can be used alone in a Mathematics course, or as reference in an Engineering course. One field of study that has enjoyed the power and flexibility of Matlab in the recent years is Computational Biology or Bioinformatics. Even though there are plenty of applications popping up here and there for this area of research, the area is still very much untapped and algorithms need to be developed for it as we go forward. Matlab is the best way to try out these new or improved algorithms, and use some of the available tools out there to generate C source code from your Matlab files. This method of algorithms development could save you tons of time, since Matlab makes numerical programming very simple. The authors start with the basics in Numerical Methods; assuming that this book will be used as the primary text book in the course. A very good assumption, and the instructors who choose otherwise, can always skip the preliminaries. The context of text aims to provide a good balance of theory and application. One way that the authors try to keep this balance is to talk about "error" rate for the algorithms in question. The students are thought the limitations of Matlab along with the strengths of the software, and error analysis is one way to show the students that the results of numerical analysis is Matlab is not perfect, and more importantly why. This error analysis is done for every major algorithm and method presented in the text, and a number of methodologies are presented to help the student in figuring out this rate. Authors start the main contents of the book with a representation of basic Linear Systems followed by a more complicated topic of Polynomial Approximation. Taylor Series and Lagrange Approximations are thoroughly covered in theory followed by examples that are solved by "hand" and by Matlab. The examples are complete, and can even be used, at least to start with, for the problem sets at the end of the chapter. As one would guess, curve fitting is the next topic of discussion. As you know, numerical techniques in science and engineering often requires curve fitting of experimental data. Starting with simple techniques of Least-Squares Lines, non-Linear Least-Square Methods and ending with the four different flavors of Spline Functions. The Matlab examples becomes more advanced as the topic progresses, and more and more examples are giv

Good introduction to numercal algorithms

The book covers most of the traditional methods. It is a good choice for learning numerical methods. The book has plenty of examples and are very easy to follow. I would recommend some background on calculus and some knoledge about matlab