A Guided Tour of Mathematical Physics

Book Description

Provides a comprehensive tour of the mathematical methods needed by Physical Science students./p>

Reviews From AMAZON.COM

Great physical insight

This book by Roel Sneider provides a solid foundation of various physical (geophysical) problems in a unified mathematical framework and complements many other excellent books on mathematical physics. It takes a mathematical equation and explains the physical insight in terms of known observational physics and identifies questions at various steps (in form of excercise) which is very important. The objective of these questions are to introduce complexity in a stepwise manner which is often hard to do. The solution treatment of the problem are primarily in analytical form using vector calculas in most part, Green's function and transform calculas. I particularly like the chapters on conservation laws, scale analysis and Green's function. I am using this as a text to teach a course on Properties and Processes of the Earth for first year geophysics graduate students at Boise State University.

APPLIED Physics: Practical yet theoretically advanced

The book was excellent and extremely practical while avoiding mathematical obfuscation common to such books. Yet it did not sacrifice more advance theoretical concepts, a truly remarkable achievement. A wonderful book for self-learning, easily in the same league as "Div, Grad, Curl and All That" and similar excellent books, but more advanced. Also great for "cleaning up" and "pulling together" that sketchy undergrad education in mathematics and its use in physics and engineering. I also appreciated the very strong and coherent treatment of wave propagation in general. While pulling from the literature in seismology, it also generalizes to other fields such as electromagnetics. Its use of examples from seismology and earth science are very fascinating, and inherently practical. Highly recommended. Having written my own textbook, I appreciate even more Prof. Snieder's accomplishment.

Michael W. Burke, Lawrence Livermore National Lab