Book Reviews

A series of book reviews including:…Fundamentals of teaching mathematics at university level by B.Baumslag. Publisher: Imperial College Press, ISBN: 1-86094-214-8. Reviewed by Bob Burn: With the assessment of teaching acquiring a more important role in British universities, a book with such a title should be valuable. It is however, a bit of a curate’s egg. There are valuable parts: a list of AMS, MAA and LMS videos in appendix B, and in other appendices interesting quotations and teaching maxims. There is a fine acknowledgement in chapter 6 of how reading a maths book must be done quite differently from reading most other kinds of books, and in the same chapter a recommendation that every formal definition should be accompanied by an intuitive description. Chapter 11 contains a good section on diagrams and generic examples and another on special cases and generality, with the same idea reiterated in chapter 12…/…Engineering Statistics 2nd Ed by D.C Montgomery, G.C Runger and N.F. Hubele, 2001. Published by John Wiley, New York. Hard-Bound, 494 p plus app ISBN 0 471 38879 3. Reviewed by Dave Stewardson: This is the second edition of a reduced version of a longer text (Applied Statistics and Probability for Engineers 1999) by the same authors and publishers. This cut down version is intended to avoid much of the harder statistical theory that underpins the basic concepts and thus to provide an introductory applied course devoid of most of the difficult and, from an engineering point of view, unnecessary mathematics. Examples come from a variety of engineering disciplines, although manufacturing predominates…/…Design and Analysis of Experiments 5th Ed by Douglas C Montgomery, 2001. Published by John W