Elements of Applied Mathematics

This book is not a textbook in the ordinary sense of the word but rather a reader in the mathematical sciences. Using simple examples taken from physics and a variety of mathematical problems, we have tried to introduce the reader to a broad range of ideas and methods that are found in present-day applications of mathematics to physics, engineering and other fields. Some of these ideas and methods (such as the use of the delta function, the principle of superposition, obtaining asymptotic expressions, etc.) have not been sufficiently discussed in the ordinary run of mathematics textbooks for non-mathematicians, and so this text can serve as a supplement to such textbooks. Our aim has been to elucidate the basic ideas of mathematical methods and the general laws of the phenomena at hand. Formal proofs, exceptions and complicating factors have for the most part been dropped. Instead we have strived in certain places to go deeper into the physical picture of the processes.