History of the Numerical Analysis text

by Burden and Faires

The first edition of Numerical Analysis was published more than 20 years ago. It was the first book to provide a full-year treatment of methods for approximating the solution to mathematical problems for undergraduates in science and engineering. We have endeavored to keep the book current but within the mainstream of the curriculum of undergraduate science and engineering.

In the following paragraphs we will describe some of the new features in this edition. Detailed information on the changes can be found in the Preface of the book.

Eighth Edition

The Eighth edition of this book (ISBN 0-534-39200-8) was released by Brooks-Cole Publishing in December 2004.  For this edition, we have added a large number of new exercises, and numerous notes that detail some of the history of numerical analysis. We have also taken advantage of the slightly larger text width to add comments that emphasize important points to the reader. We hope that these will give more insight to students studying the subject, and will also add to the human element of the approximation techniques.

Computer Algebra Systems

Many of us teaching numerical analysis in the past few years have found that students are increasingly using a computer algebra system to perform the required calculations. This permits them to see the effects of the individual steps of a method without having to perform time-consuming computations. Because of this, we have adopted the computer algebra system Maple as our standard computation device and include many of the required Maple commands in the text.

Programs for the Algorithms

In our previous editions we have included a CD on which we have placed programs for all the languages in the programming languages C, FORTRAN, and Pascal, as well as in worksheets for the computer algebra systems Maple, MATLAB, and Mathematica. Since our primary computational tool in the book is Maple, we included various versions of the algorithms for this system, because the syntax varies slightly among the versions.

The reviewers for this edition suggested, and we agreed, that it would be more useful to have these programs included on our web site, where they can be download in total or individually. We hope that by eliminating the need for the inclusion of the CD this will reduce the cost of the book without effecting its usefullness. It will also permit us to update the programs when new releases of the software become available. We have additionally added Java programs to this collection. The link Numerical Analysis Programs provides the programs in the various formats and instructions for their implementation. Please observe that this is copyright material and licensed only to students and faculty at schools that are currently using the Eighth Edition of Numerical Analysis by Burden and Faires.

Student Study Guide

A new feature of this edition concerns the production of the Student Study Guide. We have spent a great deal of time preparing the Guide to ensure that it is useful for students. The Guide illustrates in detail each of the major features of the exercises, and additionally provides proofs of many of the extensions to the methods in the text. However, the cost of the Guide has escalated to the point that the price it is beyond the reach of many students.

We have decided to produce the Guide on our own for this edition, and will distribute it at our cost to students who are at schools that use the Eighth Edition of Numerical Analysis. In addition, we will do our best to tailor the Guide to suit the requirements of instructors at schools that are using our text. We cannot do this in a hard copy version, because of the cost of printing small runs, but will endeavor to make specific additions available as PDF files in a format that is consistent with that of the Guide.

The first two chapters of the Student Study Guide can be viewed in PDF format. We hope that this inclusion will enable students to better make a decision as to whether they should purchase the Guide.If you would like addition information about the Guide please contact us.

Users of the Book

If you are interested in the knowing what others think about the book, you might like to ask someone at a school listed on our most recent adoption list. This list is for the Seventh Edition and was provided for us by Brooks/Cole Publishing. It unfortunately lists only schools within the United States. We apologize in advance for any omissions, or worse,  erroneous inclusions.

There is an errata list for the first printing of the book. These corrections should be made in any subsequent printings.

Contact Information

If you have any comments about the current edition, or  suggestions for a future edition, please contact us at  burden@math.ysu.edu or at  faires@math.ysu.edu. Our most valuable suggestions come from users of the book, many of whom are students, who contact us to tell what they like and how we can improve our presentation. We greatly appreciate all these contributions.