Book Reviews and Maths CAA series update

A collection of four book reviews including:….Handbook of mathematical discourse (2002) by Charles Wells, reviewed by Tony Gardner: The Handbook “is a compilation of mathematical usage with a focus on usage that causes problems for students. It also contains words describing behaviors and attitudes that students and instructors might have.” Many who (like this reviewer) have pondered such things in a superficial way for many years will turn to it in the hope of finding an analysis on a deeper level - for the theme should be of concern to all who teach mathematics….Calculus: Multivariable (Second Edition) by R T Smith and R B Minton, reviewed by David Griffel: The book starts with Chapter 10. This makes sense when you realise that the text is just a reprint of the last five chapters of the authors’ book Calculus. This is one of many calculus texts from the USA, all with essentially the same syllabus; the multivariable part has chapters on vectors, curves, partial differentiation, multiple integrals, and vector fields. As usual there is a web site with a great deal of additional material….Advanced Engineering Mathematics by Robert J Lopez, reviewed by Dirk Hermans: This book deals with engineering mathematics at a good second year undergraduate level and above. It contains nine units: Ordinary Differential Equations - Part one, Infinite Series, Ordinary Differential Equations - Part two, Vector Calculus, Boundary Value Problems for PDE’s, Matrix Algebra, Complex Variables, Numerical Methods and Calculus of Variations. The book is rather bulky nearly (1400 pages) but this is in line with the size of comparable texts….Elementary Linear Algebra: Application