Books about Approximation from Amazon.com

Incompressible Flow, Third Edition is the updated and revised edition of Ronald Panton’s classic text on fluid mechanics Beginning with basic principles, this Third Edition patiently develops the math and physics leading to major theories. The book provides a unified presentation of physics, mathematics, and engineering applications, along with a liberal supplement of helpful exercises and example problems. New features include chapters on the modern measurements of the pipe flow friction factor, expanded details on the mathematics of E2E2Y operator, the Jeffrey-Hamel solution and its limits with Reynolds number, and more. Complete with new problems, solvable with such PC-based calculation software as MathCAD and MATLAB, Incompressible Flow, Third Edition is a valuable resource for professionals in the mechanical, aerospace, civil, and chemical engineering fields..
Price: $101.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

An easy-to-understand primer on advanced calculus topics

Calculus II is a prerequisite for many popular college majors, including pre-med, engineering, and physics Calculus II For Dummies offers expert instruction, advice, and tips to help second semester calculus students get a handle on the subject and ace their exams. It covers intermediate calculus topics in plain English, featuring in-depth coverage of integration, including substitution, integration techniques and when to use them, approximate integration, and improper integrals. This hands-on guide also covers sequences and series, with introductions to multivariable calculus, differential equations, and numerical analysis. Best of all, it includes practical exercises designed to simplify and enhance understanding of this complex subject..
Price: $10.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Confusing Textbooks? Missed Lectures? Not Enough Time?

Fortunately for you, there's Schaum's Outlines More than 40 million students have trusted Schaum's to help them succeed in the classroom and on exams. Schaum's is the key to faster learning and higher grades in every subject. Each Outline presents all the essential course information in an easy-to-follow, topic-by-topic format. You also get hundreds of examples, solved problems, and practice exercises to test your skills.

This Schaum's Outline gives you

• Practice problems with full explanations that reinforce knowledge
• Coverage of the most up-to-date developments in your course field
• In-depth review of practices and applications

Fully compatible with your classroom text, Schaum's highlights all the important facts you need to know. Use Schaum's to shorten your study time-and get your best test scores!

Schaum's Outlines-Problem Solved.

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Price: $9.32 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book covers the dominant theoretical approaches to the approximate solution of hard combinatorial optimization and enumeration problems. It contains elegant combinatorial theory, useful and interesting algorithms, and deep results about the intrinsic complexity of combinatorial problems. Its clarity of exposition and excellent selection of exercises will make it accessible and appealing to all those with a taste for mathematics and algorithms.

Richard Karp,University Professor, University of California at Berkeley

Following the development of basic combinatorial optimization techniques in the 1960s and 1970s, a main open question was to develop a theory of approximation algorithms. In the 1990s, parallel developments in techniques for designing approximation algorithms as well as methods for proving hardness of approximation results have led to a beautiful theory. The need to solve truly large instances of computationally hard problems, such as those arising from the Internet or the human genome project, has also increased interest in this theory. The field is currently very active, with the toolbox of approximation algorithm design techniques getting always richer.

It is a pleasure to recommend Vijay Vazirani's well-written and comprehensive book on this important and timely topic. I am sure the reader will find it most useful both as an introduction to approximability as well as a reference to the many aspects of approximation algorithms.

László Lovász, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research

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Price: $37.43 [Notify me when price goes down.]

If you want top grades and thorough understanding of numerical analysis, this powerful study tool is the best tutor you can have! It takes you step-by-step through the subject and gives you accompanying related problems with fully worked solutions. You also get additional problems to solve on your own, working at your own speed. (Answers at the back show you how you’re doing.) Famous for their clarity, wealth of illustrations and examples—and lack of dreary minutiae—Schaum’s Outlines have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. This guide will show you why!.
Price: $5.66 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Analytic philosophers once pantomimed physics: they tried to understand the world by breaking it down into the smallest possible bits. Thinkers from the Darwinian sciences now pose alternatives to this simplistic reductionism.

In this intellectual tour--essays spanning thirty years--William Wimsatt argues that scientists seek to atomize phenomena only when necessary in the search to understand how entities, events, and processes articulate at different levels. Evolution forms the natural world not as Laplace's all-seeing demon but as a backwoods mechanic fixing and re-fashioning machines out of whatever is at hand. W. V. Quine's lost search for a "desert ontology" leads instead to Wimsatt's walk through a tropical rain forest.

This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world. Against eliminative reductionism, Wimsatt pits new perspectives to deal with emerging natural and social complexities. He argues that our philosophy should be rooted in heuristics and models that work in practice, not only in principle. He demonstrates how to do this with an analysis of the strengths, the limits, and a recalibration of our reductionistic and analytic methodologies. Our aims are changed and our philosophy is transfigured in the process.

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Price: $39.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The book is conveniently divided into two major sections The first, an introduction to engineering, begins with a description and breakdown of the enginering profession. Material concerning most disciplines in engineering is included in this section. Engineering design is also introduced in this section, providing an opportunity to investigate the "essence of engineering" in a holistic manner. The second major section, processing engineering data, includes the essentials required in preparing for any engineering curriculum. It covers, for example, problem-solving procedures(including solving open-ended problems), engineering estimations, dimensions, and units (including both customary and SI units)..
Price: $65.69 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Meshfree approximation methods are a relatively new area of research, and there are only a few books covering it at present Whereas other works focus almost entirely on theoretical aspects or applications in the engineering field, this book provides the salient theoretical results needed for a basic understanding of meshfree approximation methods. The emphasis here is on a hands-on approach that includes MATLAB routines for all basic operations. Meshfree approximation methods, such as radial basis function and moving least squares method, are discussed from a scattered data approximation and partial differential equations point of view. A good balance is supplied between the necessary theory and implementation in terms of many MATLAB programs, with examples and applications to illustrate key points. Used as class notes for graduate courses at Northwestern University, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Vanderbilt University, this book will appeal to both mathematics and engineering graduate students..
Price: $39.60 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Is there always a prime number between $n$ and $2n$? Where, approximately, is the millionth prime? And just what does calculus have to do with answering either of these questions? It turns out that calculus has a lot to do with both questions, as this book can show you. The theme of the book is approximations. Calculus is a powerful tool because it allows us to approximate complicated functions with simpler ones. Indeed, replacing a function locally with a linear--or higher order--approximation is at the heart of calculus. The real star of the book, though, is the task of approximating the number of primes up to a number $x$. This leads to the famous Prime Number Theorem--and to the answers to the two questions about primes. While emphasizing the role of approximations in calculus, most major topics are addressed, such as derivatives, integrals, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, sequences, series, and so on. However, our particular point of view also leads us to many unusual topics: curvature, Padé approximations, public key cryptography, and an analysis of the logistic equation, to name a few. The reader takes an active role in developing the material by solving problems. Most topics are broken down into a series of manageable problems, which guide you to an understanding of the important ideas. There is also ample exposition to fill in background material and to get you thinking appropriately about the concepts. Approximately Calculus is intended for the reader who has already had an introduction to calculus, but wants to engage the concepts and ideas at a deeper level. It is suitable as a text for an honors or alternative second semester calculus course..
Price: $49.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]