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Preface Of Fundamental Numerical Method

The origins of this book can be found years ago when I was a doctoral candidate working on my thesis and finding that I needed numerical tools that I should have been taught years before. In the intervening decades, little has changed except for the worse. All fields of science have undergone an information explosion while the computer revolution has steadily and irrevocability been changing our lives. Although the crystal ball of the future is at best "seen through a glass darkly", most would declare that the advent of the digital electronic computer will change civilization to an extent not seen since the coming of the steam engine. Computers with the power that could be offered only by large institutions a decade ago now sit on the desks of individuals. Methods of analysis that were only dreamed of three decades ago are now used by students to do homework exercises. Entirely new methods of analysis have appeared that take advantage of computers to perform logical and arithmetic operations at great speed. Perhaps students of the future may regard the multiplication of two two-digit numbers without the aid of a calculator in the same vein that we regard the formal extraction of a square root. The whole approach to scientific analysis may change with the advent of machines that communicate orally. However, I hope the day never arrives when the investigator no longer understands the nature of the analysis done by the machine.
Unfortunately instruction in the uses and applicability of new methods of analysis rarely appears in the curriculum. This is no surprise as such courses in any discipline always are the last to be developed. In rapidly changing disciplines this means that active students must fend for themselves. With numerical analysis this has meant that many simply take the tools developed by others and apply them to problems with little knowledge as to the applicability or accuracy of the methods. Numerical algorithms appear as neatly packaged computer...