Endre Süli - Böcker

The Society for the Foundations of Computational Mathematics supports fundamental research in a wide spectrum of computational mathematics and its application areas. As part of its endeavour to promote research in computational mathematics, the society regularly organises conferences and workshops which bring together leading researchers in the diverse fields impinging on all aspects of computation. This book presents thirteen papers written by plenary speakers from the 1999 conference, all of whom are the foremost figures in their respective fields. Topics covered include complexity theory, approximation theory, optimisation, computational geometry, stochastic systems and the computation of partial differential equations. The wide range of topics covered illustrates the diversity of contemporary computational mathematics and the intricate web of its interaction with pure mathematics and application areas. This book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in all areas of mathematics involving numerical and symbolic computations.

Numerical analysis provides the theoretical foundation for the numerical algorithms we rely on to solve a multitude of computational problems in science. Based on a successful course at Oxford University, this book covers a wide range of such problems ranging from the approximation of functions and integrals to the approximate solution of algebraic, transcendental, differential and integral equations. Throughout the book, particular attention is paid to the essential qualities of a numerical algorithm - stability, accuracy, reliability and efficiency. The authors go further than simply providing recipes for solving computational problems. They carefully analyse the reasons why methods might fail to give accurate answers, or why one method might return an answer in seconds while another would take billions of years. This book is ideal as a text for students in the second year of a university mathematics course. It combines practicality regarding applications with consistently high standards of rigour.