This well-respected text gives an introduction to the modern approximation techniques and explains how, why, and when the techniques can be expected to work. The authors focus on building students' intuition to help them understand why the techniques presented work in general, and why, in some situations, they fail. With a wealth of examples and exercises, the text demonstrates the relevance of numerical analysis to a variety of disciplines and provides ample practice for students. The applications chosen demonstrate concisely how numerical methods can be, and often must be, applied in real-life situations. In this edition, the presentation has been fine-tuned to make the book even more useful to the instructor and more interesting to the reader. Overall, students gain a theoretical understanding of, and a firm basis for future study of, numerical analysis and scientific computing. A more applied text with a different menu of topics is the authors' highly regarded NUMERICAL METHODS, Third Edition.

Benefits:

• NEW! The authors have added nearly 200 exercises, most of which are relatively routine, to give instructors more varied choices for their problem assignments.
• NEW! More than 150 historical and instructional comments appear in the margins.
• NEW! The text and examples have been carefully edited for clarity and ease of understanding.
• Virtually every concept in the text is illustrated by example, and this edition contains more than 2000 class-tested exercises ranging from elementary applications of methods and algorithms to generalizations and extensions of the theory.
• The exercise sets include many applied problems from diverse areas of engineering, as well as from the physical, computer, biological, and social sciences.
• The text utilizes Maple® as the standard software package, including extensive listings of Maple code throughout the text. However, Derive® or Mathematica® can be substituted with only minor modifications.
• The programs for solutions to representative exercises using the algorithms are available. The programs for each algorithm are written in C, Fortran, and Pascal and they are also coded for Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB®.
• The design of the text gives instructors flexibility in choosing topics they wish to cover, selecting the level of theoretical rigor desired, and deciding which applications are most appropriate or interesting for their classes.