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Preface: My Goals For This Book

Mathematics is a necessary language for doing engineering and science, says author. He says it's risky to accept computer calculations without parallel closed-form modeling. This second edition features: a more formal statement of a principled approach to mathematical modeling. 360 problems, many of which are designed to reinforce skills in mathematical manipulation.

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40 views4 pages

Preface: My Goals For This Book

Mathematics is a necessary language for doing engineering and science, says author. He says it's risky to accept computer calculations without parallel closed-form modeling. This second edition features: a more formal statement of a principled approach to mathematical modeling. 360 problems, many of which are designed to reinforce skills in mathematical manipulation.

Uploaded by

acmoliv
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Preface

My Goals For This Book


Science and engineering students depend heavily on concepts of mathematical modeling. In an age where almost everything is done on a computer, it is my conviction that students of engineering and science are better served if they understand and own the underlying mathematics that the computers are doing on their behalf. Mathematics is a necessary language for doing engineering and science. This will remain true no matter how good computation becomes. I repeatedly tell students that it is risky to accept computer calculations without having done some parallel closed-form modeling to benchmark the computer results. Without such benchmarking and validation, how do we know that the computer isnt talking nonsense? Finally, I nd it satisfying and fun to do mathematical manipulations that explain how or why something happens, and to use mathematics to obtain corresponding numerical data or predictions. Thus, as it was for the rst edition, my primary goal for this second edition remains to engage the reader in developing a foundation for mathematical modeling. Further, knowing that mathematical models are built in a range of disciplinesincluding physics, biology, ecology, economics, sociology, military strategy, as well as all of the many branches of engineeringand knowing that mathematical modeling is comprised of a very diverse set of skills and tools, I focused on techniques of particular interest to engineers, scientists, and others who model continuous systems.
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Features of This Edition


Aided by a variety of reviewers comments and suggestions, this second edition features: A more formal statement of a principled approach to mathematical modeling (in Chapter 1). Ten principles are articulated and invoked as applications are developed, and each of them is identied by a key word (see below). Some 360 problems, many of which are designed to reinforce skills in mathematical manipulation. Many could be done with a computer algebra system (CAS), and there are others for which numerical programs could be used. However, given my goals for this book, I would ask students do the problems in the old-fashioned way. A reordering and expansion of the applications chapters that reects some sense of increasing complexity. Expanded gure captions that are intended to be more informative.

How This Book Is Organized


The book is organized into two parts: foundations and applications. The rst part lays out the fundamental mathematical ideas of interest to the model builder: dimensional analysis, scaling, and elementary approximations of curves and functions. The applications part of the book develops a series of models and discusses their origins, their validity, and their meaning. These models include a host of exponential models, trafc ow models, free and forced vibration of linear (and occasionally nonlinear) oscillators, and optimization as done both with calculus and with elementary operations research techniques. In the applications discussions, reference to the modeling principles is made by highlighting appropriate key words in the margin immediately adjacent to the appropriate text, as in:
Why? Find?

Lanchester wanted to describe the attrition of opposing forces at war. This required modeling the changes of two army populations whose respective rates of attrition depend on the size of the opposing army. The foundations and applications parts of the book are connected only loosely. The following matrix indicates roughly how the chapters in each part relate to each other. In fact, the readerand the teachercan easily start with Chapter 5 and work through the applications models, referring back to corresponding discussions of the foundations as needed.

Preface

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The problems distributed throughout and at the end of each chapter (save Chapter 1) are an integral part of the book. Like bike riding and dancing and designing, mathematical modeling cannot be learned simply by reading. Skills are developed and honed by doing problems, both elementary and difcult. Thus, there are problems that provide drills in basic skills, and there are problems that either develop new models or expand on models developed earlier in the text. For example, in problems at the end of Chapter 3 we show how dimensional groups are used to interpret experimental results. The problems in Chapter 5 demonstrate how dimensional analysis interacts with other approaches to deriving the governing equations for the oscillating pendulum, and the problems in Chapter 7 include data on resonance and impedance for a variety of forced oscillators.
Models 5 Exponential Growth and Decay Dimensional Analysis Scaling Approximation 6 Trafc Flow Models 7 Modeling Free Vibration 8 Applying Vibration Models 9 What Is the Best?

Tools 2 3 4

As noted earlier, many of the problems could be done with a computer, whether a symbolic manipulator, a spreadsheet, or an algorithmic number cruncher. However, in order to learn to do mathematical modeling, the problems should be done in closed form, with pencil and paper, with access only to a simple electronic calculator. This will both reinforce skills and provide a basis for benchmarking future computer calculations. Three appendices from the rst edition have been moved closer to their use in the book. A brief review of elementary transcendental functions is now appended to Chapter 4; the mathematics of the rst-order equation, dN /dt N = 0, is outlined in Section 5.2.2; and the mathematics of the second-order oscillator equation, md 2 x/dt 2 + kx = F (t ), is detailed in Sections 7.2.2. and 8.6. Lastly, the book can be used in several ways. The rst edition was developed for new courses in mathematical modeling that were offered to rst-year engineering students at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The book could also serve as a rst course in applied mathematics for mathematics majors, or as a technical elective for various science and engineering majors, or conceivably as a supplementary text in basic calculus courses. In hopes of extending

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its audience, I have tried to enhance both the books accessibility and its exibility.

I Presume That You, the Reader, Have. . .


. . . taken courses in elementary algebra, trigonometry, and rst-year calculus. I further presume that you recognize what a differential equation is and what it means for y(x) or y(x, t ) to be a solution of a differential equation. While you wont be asked to solve a differential equation, you will be asked to conrm and manipulate some of the solutions that are given. Finally, I do assume some basic understanding of rst-year physics, mainly mechanics.

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