Description

This book is a text for a one-semester course for upper-level undergraduates and beginning graduate students in engineering, science, and mathematics. Prerequisites are a first course in the theory of ODEs and a survey course in numerical analysis, in addition to specific programming experience, preferably in MATLAB, and knowledge of elementary matrix theory. Professionals will also find that this useful concise reference contains reviews of technical issues and realistic and detailed examples. The programs for the examples are supplied on the accompanying web site and can serve as templates for solving other problems. Each chapter begins with a discussion of the "facts of life" for the problem, mainly by means of examples. Numerical methods for the problem are then developed, but only those methods most widely used. The treatment of each method is brief and technical issues are minimized, but all the issues important in practice and for understaning the codes are discussed. The last part of each chapter is a tutorial that shows how to solve problems by means of small, but realistic, examples.