An Engineer's Guide to Mathematica

Preface

The primary goal of this book is to help the reader attain the skills to create Mathematica programs that obtain symbolic and numerical solutions to a wide range of engineering topics, and to display the numerical results with annotated graphics.

Some of the features that make the most recent versions of Mathematica a powerful tool for solving a wide range of engineering applications are their recent introduction of new or expanded capabilities in differential equations, controls, signal processing, optimization, and statistics. These capabilities, coupled with its seamless integration of symbolic manipulations, engineering units, numerical calculations, and its diverse interactive graphics, provide engineers with another effective means of obtaining solutions to engineering problems.

The level of the book assumes that the reader has some fluency in engineering mathematics, can employ the engineering approach to problem solving, and has some experience in using mathematical models to predict the response of elements, devices, and systems. It should be suitable for undergraduate and graduate engineering students and for practicing engineers.

The book can be used in several ways: (1) to learn Mathematica; (2) as a companion to engineering texts; and (3) as a reference for obtaining numerical and symbolic solutions to a wide range of engineering topics involving ordinary and partial differential equations, optimization, eigenvalue determination, statistics, and so on.