Publisher's Synopsis
This volume is intended to be a guide for individual study or supervised courses in applied mathematics for scientists at undergraduate level. It may serve as an entry to college mathematics by introducing concepts in a striking manner or it may be used to illustrate the conventional, rather abstract, courses offered at universities. The book is based on the student versions of MATLAB 5, which provide unique means for exploring algebra and calculus by a minimum of commands and syntactic rules. In the first few chapters, MATLAB is used as an ordinary calculator. The concept of vectors is then introduced, and these serve as tools for drawing curves. The graphics is used in a direct way to find zeros, extreme points and limits, so that the relation to elementary arithmetic becomes obvious. By very simple and concrete methods the reader is guided through algebra, calculus, probability theory and curve fitting, ordinary differential equations, and Fourier analysis. The student is supposed to type the short scripts employed, thus gradually becoming acquainted with basic programming. Each group of subjects is completed by an introduction to the symbolic facilities of MATLAB. In this part of the software, the recipes of traditional mathematics are available, and analytic results may be obtained with little effort.
