Abstract
AMERICAN text-books of mathematics rarely find favour in Great Britain, and this work, written by a professor of the U.S. Naval Academy to meet the requirements of student officers, is scarcely likely to prove an exception. The tendency throughout is to give an empirical and mechanical knowledge of the subject, so that the engineer uses his mathematics merely as a tool. This is typified by the fact that a student is encouraged at an early stage in his mathematical career to rely on a table of integrals, rather than to acquire the facility for evaluating them independently. The degree to which the subject has been condensed may be judged from the fact that the theory of errors, method of least squares, and curve fitting have been dismissed in 42 pages.
The Mathematics of Engineering.
By Prof. Ralph E. Root. Pp. xiii + 540. (London: Bailliëre, Tindall and Cox, 1927.) 34s. net.
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C., L. The Mathematics of Engineering. Nature 121, 318 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/121318a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/121318a0