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Burden and Faires: Numerical Analysis
This Numerical Analysis book was released in its first edition more than 20 years ago. It is designed to provide a first introduction to the techniques of mathematical approximation and scientific computing for students with minimal mathematical background. There is sufficient material included in the book to permit a full-year course for mathematics majors at the undergraduate level, or for students in other disciplines at the undergraduate or beginning graduate level.
The Eighth edition of this book was released in December of 2004 for the North American market by Brooks-Cole Publishing (ISBN 0-534-39200-80), and for the International market by Thomson Learning (ISBN 0-534-40499-5). Information on the book can be found at our web site, Numerical Analysis, 8th Edition. Included at this location is a link to a fairly current adoption list and an errata sheet for the first printing.
If you have any comments about the current edition or are interested in doing a prerevison review of this book please contact us at faires@math.ysu.edu or burden@math.ysu.edu .
The Fourth Edition of this book was released in October 2006. Numerous modifications were made to the text to clarify areas where students seemed to have difficulty and all the exercise sets were reworked. The book is still of a size that will permit all the essentials to be covered in one term. The Preface for the Fourth Edition gives additional detail about the extent of the revision and can be found at PreCalculus, Fourth Edition, which is the official web site for the book.
Changes to the Fourth Edition include the modification of many of the rountine exercises to ensure that the material does not become stale for previous users of the book. We also rewrote many of the text examples to ensure that students have samples for all the standard exercises. The Review Exercises were re-examined to ensure that a student who could work these problems truly had a firm grasp of the material in each chapter.
Special care was taken to ensure accuracy in the Fourth Edition. Two independent accuracy checkers were employed to check every result in the answer section of the book before the page proofs stage of production. One of the accuracy checkers was an undergraduate student who ensured that each example and exercise would be correctly interpreted by students. In addition, a third accuracy checker was employed to check all the results in the Instructors' Manual after the page proofs were produced. Finally, independent editors were used to check all the text in page proof form and when the first pages were printed.
As soon as the first copies of the book were produced, the authors went over all the text, figures, and answers to ensure that the corrections that we asked to be made at the page proof stage were correctly entered. We are pleased to report that we did not find any errors in this first printing. We would like to think that there actually are no errors, but we have done too much writing to hope that this is the case. However, if (when) errors are found they will be posted at this web site.
An extensive Student Study Guide has been prepared for the Fourth Edition to help students who need more review than the book can provide, and to show students how to solve all the odd exercises. The first four sections of the Study Guide are available for download from the web site. We have been over this document and the Instructor's Manual in detail and have found nothing that needs to be corrected.
We also have copies of a PreCalculus-Calculus Readiness test that students can use to access their preparation for these courses.
On the advice of reviewers, the section on Rotation of Axes, which was included in the First Edition, was deleted from the Second Edition. From the Third Edition we deleted the section on Descarte's Rule of Signs. If you are interested in this material you can find it posted on our web site. It is our intention to keep the book in a manageable size, and to delete material in subsequent editions that is found not to be used by a majority of adopters of the book. However, we will keep any deleted material current on the web site in a form that can be downloaded and produced on an individual basis. We expect to be able to add additional material to the web site that users find they would like to present in their courses. For example, we are currently working on a section covering the basics of three-dimensional vectors, and expect to have another section later on an introduction to sequences and series.
Please address any comments on the book to faires@math.ysu.edu or defranza@vm.stlaw.edu .
Faires and Burden: Numerical Methods
The Third Edition of this book was released by Brooks-Cole in 2003. We have added a great deal of Computer Algebra System material to the book and added new sections on the Conjugate Gradient Method and on Homotopy methods. A disk accompanying the book contains programs in C, FORTRAN, and Pascal for all the methods, and worksheets for the Computer Algebra Systems Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB. Information about this book can be found at Numerical Methods, Third Edition.
If you have suggestions for us concerning this book please contact us at faires@math.ysu.edu or burden@math.ysu.edu.