The Foreword for the First edition of the book «Mathcad PLUS 6.0 for Students and Engineers»
There is a story. A balloon floats away in the clouds. The crew caught
sight of a man and shouted: «Where are we?» — « You are in a basket.» It was an
answer of a mathematician. Only a mathematician could give an absolutely right
and absolutely useless answer.
Books, which just inform a reader about new application programs
duplicating the program’s documentation are similar to the mathematician’s
answer if not in accuracy but in uselessness. Often the book comes out at the
same time as the new version of the program with new possibilities requiring
new analysis (a phenomenon of the light of a dying star). This is the reason
why the author has not described Mathcad in a traditional way.
The book consists of the problem (studies, etudes) ¾ in Russian one word covers all these meanings. The author understands
that this style may not be sufficient for a reader. That is why the book falls
into two parts. The first part collects the problems. What are they? In the
language of chess-players a problem means an exercise to work out some
situations in the play. The problems of this book can’t teach you to use Mathcad (just as trying to teach somebody to swim on dry land), but they can
show the ideology of working with Mathcad. Simple examples broach the critical
mathematical questions (algebraic and differential equations, simultaneous
equations, optimization, statistics, simulation, and symbolic mathematics).
A study by an artist is a drawing that is done in preparation for a
future picture. The mathematical problems of this book aren’t only the
exercises, but a kind of study where an attentive reader can find a lot of
advice and interesting ideas useful to draw large Mathcad pictures. This is the
third book in the style of problems on computer science.
An old song in the new style ¾
perhaps a translation of the English word remake. The idea of «remake» is most
popular in the cinema. We can often see a new film based on an old scenario.
This method is used in programming, for example, when a DOS-version of a
program is rewritten for Windows. The author uses remakes too for some of the
problems originally appeared, in particular, as articles in the Computer Press
magazine. In this connection the author regrets about possible revisions and
self-compilation.
The second part of the book (appendix) has another author and another
style: MathSoft Inc. (101, Main Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) provides
information from the User Guide translated by the Russian company SoftLine
Corp.
The
author expresses deep gratitude to:
· N.A. Slivina,
perfect mathematician and very nice lady, for her help in preparation of the
articles — a basis of the book. Our discussion about the role of computers in
teaching mathematicians is on these pages.
· I.P. Borovikov,
director of the firm SoftLine, Steven Finch and Rob Dooly, managers of
MathSoft, Inc.
· A. Shevchenko and
all the students of Moscow Power Engineering Institute (Technical University):
to the students of my Computer Science course, whose dialogue has helped the
author to write this book.
June, 1996