Mathematics for Physicists (Dover Books on Physics)

This book is fantastic in its discussion and pedagogy. It covers a lot of important topics concisely without becoming a complicated collection of facts. The authors manage to build up the various topics in a systematic manner that greatly helps the beginner student. Overall highly recommended for its valuable content and style of presentation.

This book was recommended back when I was in grad school. All the Optics students loved it. It is clear and concise.

This is a cheap and handy math reference. The book is very comprehensive, covering most topic one would need refreshing. I strongly recommend buying it.

This is a great and somewhat unique text on Mathematical Physics. I basically learnt the theories of analytic functions and linear vector spaces from this book, with no prior knowledge of the subjects. But beware, the material presented becomes gradually less complete as the book progresses, as the authors point out in the preface. For example, they begin to state theorems without their proofs and narrow down what results are included. For this reason I probably would not recommend this book as a means of learning the topics of the last two chapters (namely, chapters 3 and 4), though they make for fine supplementary reading.Now, for the important question of rigour. This book is wholly about Mathematics, not Physics (there are, however, a section of 4 pages on applications of conformal mapping to Electrostatics and a few other such sections), and its level of rigour is probably higher than the typical Mathematical Physics text. But how does it compare with the requirements of a Mathematics text? I think that it lacks in some areas (e.g. contour integration and operators in infinite-dimensional spaces) which is not suprising given that the book's prerequisites are only Calculus, Vector Analysis, and systems of Algebraic Equations (e.g. not including plane set topology). Nevertheless, it will serve well any undergraduate theoretical physicist who needs to know the necessary mathematics yet has little time to study the topics in their most general and rigorous form (though I strongly believe that no theoretical physicist should be content with a semi-rigorous understanding of the mathematics they use, though the rigorous understanding may very unfortunately have to wait).As for the style of presentation, I say it is slightly too brief, but I no longer view this as a defect. Furthermore, there are a few typographical errors in this edition, but they are tolerable. All in all, this is a great book at a great price (typical of Dover Publications, I realize).

Great product and quick delivery.

2.0

I should have consulted this text when in graduate school the second time, @ SUNY StonyBrook. I evaluated transition integrals for atomic energy level transitions by a less sophisticated means than was ideal and still feel lousy that I did so much work when there was a “short-cut” through the woods to Grandma’s House. I spoke to my Professor briefly a couple of years ago, he retired from work @ Los Alamos and I had seen him on a PBS Nova program discussing ladder operators with Hand Bethe and Victor Weisskopf (I think) circa 1983. It took a few years before I realized it was him on camera!

Dennery and Krzywicki is somewhat unusual in the sense that it puts noticeable emphasis on the mathematical formalism and itstrives to give a broader picture of each topic instead of tedious algebraic manipulations for solving certain special problems that might not be of interest to everyone.Moreover, the authors do not try to cover a very broad spectrum of topics and rather focus on the formal aspects of fewer mathematical subjects. Altough the book`s lacking of sections on group theory and differential geometry might be seen as glaring omissions, it excels didactically in all the topics it touches upon. Especially, its treatment of complex analysis and orthogonal polynomials is absolutely exceptional.For those who want to have a reference work that contains almost every standard topic at senior undergraduate/beginning graduate level while not taking the mathematical elegance and rigor as a priority, Arfken`s text would be a better choice. For more advanced and up-to-date account of mathematical methods, I would recommend Hassani`s (Mathematical Physics) or Szekeres`s texts.All in all, I find this text as an excellent work on graduate level mathematical physics and refer it constantly for my work.