Product Description
Few beginning graduate students in mathematics and other quantitative subjects possess the daunting breadth of mathematical knowledge expected of them when they begin their studies. This book will offer students a broad outline of essential mathematics and will help to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. The author explains the basic points and a few key results of all the most important undergraduate topics in mathematics, emphasizing the intuitions behind the su… More >>
All the Mathematics You Missed But Need to Know for Graduate School
Tags: breadth, gaps, Graduate, graduate school, graduate students, intuitions, Know, mathematical knowledge, Mathematics, Missed, Need, quantitative subjects, School
#1 by D. W. Haynes on April 16, 2010 - 6:12 am
This book sucks. It has lots of useful mathematics in it, if you can decipher it. Most math classes you’ll ever take involve mindless number shuffling and you never truly understand what you’re doing. Colleges just want to produce marketable products (students) instead of good classes so most of us just repeat mathematical processes without understanding the theory behind it. This book assumes you understand those theories. I read of over some of the sections I had already learned about in college and they looked like total jibberish. Why? Because the definitions are so clinical and use notations that most of us have never seen. Not in class. Not in text books. Never! This book will make you appreciate your math teachers. It’s light on examples and the ones given don’t clearly demonstrate the logic involved.
Rating: 1 / 5
#2 by reader on April 16, 2010 - 7:47 am
You can learn about as much math from this as
you can from reading a course catalogue. There
is no need to put more thought into this review than
the author did into the ‘writing’ of the book – which
is to say not very much. Suffice it to say that:
a) you can learn much more by simply consulting the
relevant topics in wikipedia
b) stylistically the custom of lifting bodily whole
sections from other’s works is both shameful and
lends the work as a whole all the coherence of a
patchwork quilt
c) the only real work the author did appears in chapter 6
but 30 decent pages out of more than 300 total makes for
a pretty lame batting average.
Rating: 1 / 5
#3 by Anonymous on April 16, 2010 - 9:04 am
As an individual with a limited background in mathematics entering a technical graduate program, I was initially enthused when I came across this book. From its description I thought it would provide the reader with the ability to be introduced to the practical aspects of some key mathematical concepts. Instead, it is basically a stripped down book for mathematicians, focusing on proofs rather than examples. My two main gripes with this book:
1) It is devoted almost entirely to theoretical proofs and nearly devoid of numerical examples. Again, this is of limited value unless you’re entering specifically a theoretical mathematics program (I’m in physics).
2) Unless I’m missing the point, the target audience for this book is the individual reviewing this material on his/her own, outside of or in preparation for a classroom. Yet the book has no answers to any of the end-of-chapter exercises; this is a fatal flaw for a book of this type.
I’m sorry to have to give this book such a negative review, but a more appropriate title would be ‘Review of key theoretical concepts for Graduate Students in Mathematics”.
Rating: 1 / 5
#4 by Lance C. Hibbeler on April 16, 2010 - 10:11 am
I will admit upfront that I got suckered in by the title. As I write this, I’m somewhere on the downhill slope of my own graduate studies in mechanical engineering, at a university with a very strong mechanics program. I’ve struggled in some of said mechanics classes because of my relatively limited mathematics background, so this sounded like a book that was right up my alley. Garrity picks a wide range of mathematical topics, from sets to vector analysis to geometry to differential equations, and briefly covers the main points of each of the fields. He lacks true rigor (even admits it in the preface), but that isn’t the point- the book is a survey, and Garrity references many books in and at the end of each chapter. If you find yourself working in one of the areas covered, I would image that this book would be an excellent place to go for an introduction/refresher to the main concepts, and then point you in the proper direction for further study.
Despite the content, I found this book to be quite readable. There are a few typos, but nothing too distracting. The tone is more casual/conversational than what I have seen in other mathematics books. The book didn’t satisfy my expectations/goals of the purchase, but it wasn’t written for engineers…or maybe after all of my fancy book learnin’ I am already familiar enough with the topics that form the base of engineering mathematics (PDEs and vector calculus). I would still recommend the book for current or soon-to-be graduate students in math or the sciences. It seems like this will be quite the helpful tool.
Rating: 4 / 5
#5 by Stick-In-The-Mud on April 16, 2010 - 11:22 am
If you need to learn the math this is not for you. If you know the math and need a refresher this is an excellent reference. If you travel a lot an need a reference but don’t want to carry around a 10 lbs. book, this is a life saver.
Rating: 4 / 5