What's New

The basic content, organization, and pedagogy are essentially preserved in the third edition; in particular, the conversational writing style is intentionally maintained in order to make the book easier to read. This book tries to speak directly to the reader and is designed in part to be a tool for self-teaching. This edition differs from the past edition in three major ways:

1. Two new chapters: Eigenvalues and Fourier Analysis. Both chapters are written in a modular fashion and could be skipped without detriment to the course’s pedagogical arc. See the Preface for further information.
2. Several new sections; the primary additions include sections on animation (Chapter 3), Brent’s method for root location (Chapter 6), LU factorization with pivoting (Chapter 8), random numbers and Monte Carlo simulation (Chapter 14), adaptive quadrature (Chapter 20), and event termination of ODEs (Chapter 23).
3. New Homework Problems. Most of the end-of-chapter problems have been modified, and a variety of new problems have been added. In particular, an effort has been made to include several new problems for each chapter that are more challenging and difficult than the problems in the previous edition.