Product Description

Do you want easy access to the latest methods in scientific computing? This greatly expanded third edition of Numerical Recipes has it, with wider coverage than ever before, many new, expanded and updated sections, and two completely new chapters. The executable C++ code, now printed in color for easy reading, adopts an object-oriented style particularly suited to scientific applications. Co-authored by four leading scientists from academia and industry, Numerical Recipes starts with basic mathematics and computer science and proceeds to complete, working routines. The whole book is presented in the informal, easy-to-read style that made earlier editions so popular. Highlights of the new material include: a new chapter on classification and inference, Gaussian mixture models, HMMs, hierarchical clustering, and SVMs; a new chapter on computational geometry, covering KD trees, quad- and octrees, Delaunay triangulation, and algorithms for lines, polygons, triangles, and spheres; interior point methods for linear programming; MCMC; an expanded treatment of ODEs with completely new routines; and many new statistical distributions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6654 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1256 pages

Review
'This monumental and classic work is beautifully produced and of literary as well as mathematical quality. It is an essential component of any serious scientific or engineering library.' Computing Reviews

'... an instant 'classic,' a book that should be purchased and read by anyone who uses numerical methods ...' American Journal of Physics

'... replete with the standard spectrum of mathematically pretreated and coded/numerical routines for linear equations, matrices and arrays, curves, splines, polynomials, functions, roots, series, integrals, eigenvectors, FFT and other transforms, distributions, statistics, and on to ODE's and PDE's ... delightful.' Physics in Canada

'... if you were to have only a single book on numerical methods, this is the one I would recommend.' EEE Computational Science & Engineering

'This encyclopedic book should be read (or at least owned) not only by those who must roll their own numerical methods, but by all who must use prepackaged programs.' New Scientist

'These books are a must for anyone doing scientific computing.' Journal of the American Chemical Society

'The authors are to be congratulated for providing the scientific community with a valuable resource.' The Scientist

'I think this is an incredibly valuable book for both learning and reference and I recommend it for any scientists or student in a numerate discipline who need to understand and/or program numerical algorithms.' International Association for Pattern Recognition

'The attractive style of the text and the availability of the codes ensured the popularity of the previous editions and also recommended this recent volume to different categories of readers, more or less experienced in numerical computation.' Octavian Pastravanu, Zentralblatt MATH

About the Author
William H. Press holds the Raymer Chair in Computer Sciences and Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Saul A. Teukolsky is H. A. Bethe Professor in Physics in the Radiophysics and Space Research Department of Cornell University.

William Vetterling is a Research Fellow and Director of the Image Science Laboratory at ZINK Imaging, LLC in Waltham, MA. His career includes eight years on the physics faculty at Harvard and 20 years of numerical modeling and laboratory research on digital imaging at Polaroid Corporation.

Brian P. Flannery is Science, Strategy and Programs Manager at Exxon Mobil Corporation.

Customer Reviews

Essential book on scientific computing
Fifteen years after its previous edition, this peerless book on scientific computing has been upgraded with some very welcome changes. Not only have some advances in scientific computing been incorporated, the explanations are even clearer and more detailed than before. More importantly, the code has been reworked so that it is better than it was in the previous edition. I don't agree with the other reviewer that "it is getting worse". However, it still does seem like C++ code that was written by a Fortran programmer who just doesn't want to let go of the past, although I'd have to say that the code has broken away from the Fortran-like structure of previous editions to some degree. If you do scientific computing at all, this new edition is a must have. Below I detail what is different in this new third edition versus the previous 1992 edition. There are a very few sections that were deleted. I don't mention them. Instead I list any sections or chapters that have been added.

1. Preliminaries
Completely reorganized to reflect the book.

2.Solution of Linear Algebraic Equations
THE SAME

3. Interpolation and Extrapolation
3.7 Interpolation on a Scattered Data in Multidimensions
3.8 Laplace Interpolation

4. Integration of Functions
4.5 Quadrature by Variable Transformation
4.8 Adaptive Quadrature

5. Evaluation of Functions
THE SAME

6. Special Functions
6.10 Generalized Fermi-Dirac Integrals
6.11 Inverse of the Function xlog(x)
6.14 Statistical Functions

7. Random Numbers
7.2 Completely Hashing a Large Array
7.3 Deviates from Other Distributions
7.4 Multivariate Normal Deviates
7.5 Linear Feedback Shift Registers
7.6 Hash Tables and Hash Memories

8. Sorting
THE SAME

9. Root Finding and Nonlinear Sets of Equations
THE SAME

10. Minimization or Maximization of Functions
10.1 Initially Bracketing a Minimum
10.6 Line Methods in Multidimensions
10.11 Linear Programming: Interior-Point Methods
10.13 Dynamic Programming

11. Eigensystems
11.2 Real Symmetric Matrices
11.6 Real Nonsymmetric Matrices

12. Fast Fourier Transform
THE SAME

13. Fourier and Spectral Applications
THE SAME

14. Statistical Description of Data
14.7 Information-Theoretic Properties of Distributions

15. Modeling of Data
15.8 Markov Chain Monte Carlo
15.9 Gaussian Process Regression

16. Classification and Inference (NEW CHAPTER)

17. Integration of Ordinary Differential Equations
17.7 Stochastic Simulation of Chemical Reaction Networks

18. Two-Point Boundary Value Problems
THE SAME

19. Integral Equations and Inverse Theory
THE SAME

20. Partial Differential Equations
20.7 Spectral Methods

21. Computational Geometry (NEW CHAPTER)

22. Less-Numerical Algorithms
22.1 Plotting Simple Graphs

Contents improved, but codes not
I'm a fan of this book since I've been using this book for a very long time. I pre-ordered the new version and got it a week ago. I think the contents are improved after I had a look at it. I'm pretty happy about that. However, the quality of the source codes, well, I have to say it is getting worse. As you may notice, authors of N.R. put a stringent license on usage of their codes, which is fine since these codes are their intellectual properties. But since they are selling their codes, they are supposed to hire some professional programmers to design a beatiful architecture, a nice data structure, and an easy-to-use interface, and implement all the algorithms with efficiency. As I can tell, C++ is abused in the 3rd version in a very bad way. I've been developing scientific computing software using C/C++ over 10 years, and I have to say the authors of the codes organized their work in a weird way. In the previous version of their codes in C++, global variables are still defined and used at so many places. Any professional programmer knows how bad such a programming style is. In this version, instead of wrapping their routines in classes, they simply use "struct" to hold global variables, does this delight you? This is just an example which upsets me. The only good thing is that they finally learned to use template...

Valuable book, but not worth an upgrade
Bottom line up front: Every computational scientist should own a copy of Numerical Recipes but, if you already own a previous version, then don't bother upgrading.

I already owned a copy of "Numerical Recipes in C, 2nd Edition" (from 1992), so I was absolutely thrilled when I saw that the book had been updated in over 15 years. This is why I was so underwhelmed with the 3rd edition. As a previous reviewer noted, the vast majority of the book is largely unchanged.

As in previous editions, the authors do a great job of providing codes that cover the spectrum of topics encountered by researchers. As in previous editions, the authors still take the "give a man a fish" instead of the "teach a man to fish" method. This might seem like a negative but, in my opinion, this is why every scientist should own a copy of Numerical Recipes. Often, topics pop up that need immediate solving and one can often find a code for the topic in Numerical Recipes. As in previous editions, Numerical Recipes is really just an annotated code repository, with very stringent/restrictive licensing rules by the way!

However, as the authors note in the introduction, they made a conscious decision to fill pages with verbatim codes, not building insight into various topics. In my experience, the codes given in Numerical Recipes get the job done, but these tend to be simple and less efficient than other well-known algorithms.

As in previous editions, Numerical Recipes is a terrible pedagogical text. If you're interesting in understanding a particular topic, then get a special-purpose book.