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Book Review
Mathematical Handbook for Electrical Engineers, by Sergey A. Leonov and Alexander I. Leonov, Artech House 2005, ISBN 1-58053-779-0
Reviewed by Vladimir Botchev [vladimir.botchev@analog.com]
Practical engineering is a quantitative discipline using a considerable variety of mathematical expressions. Only a few people can remember them all. For the rest of us, a well-structured and easy-to-search reference is more than welcome. This book is exactly such a reference source. The authors have selected a diverse collection of mathematical concepts and calculations for the first part of the book:
a) Fundamental algebraic manipulations: fractions, polynomials, roots, etc.
b) Basic functions: trigonometric, hyperbolic, logarithmic
c) Equations, including square, cubic, transcendental, and linear systems
d) Essential combinatorics: binomials, factorial, etc.
e) Elementary plane geometry
f) Elementary solid geometry
g) Five chapters on the uses of trigonometry and the principles of analytic geometry in the plane and 3D space
h) A chapter on sequence limits, differentiation and integration (but omitting integral tables that would unnecessarily clutter the book), as well as differentiation and integration for functions of several variables, and ordinary differential equations.
i) Complex numbers and complex functions, matrix and vector algebra (including vector derivatives)
j) A large (more than 50-page) chapter on probability and statistics.
k) A MathCad-oriented chapter for solving algebraic and differential equations, integrals, matrix calculus and stochastic simulation
The second part of the book is devoted to a few specific fields in Electrical Engineering:
a) Basic electrical circuits
b) Antennas and propagation of electromagnetic waves
c) General signal processing, including basic filter design
d) In authors parlance: “stochastic radio engineering,” more commonly known as statistical signal processing, in a rather extensive chapter for a handbook.
The last part contains reference data, such as various units, formulas and tables.
When considering this book, two other titles come to mind: Mathematical Techniques for Engineers and Scientists by Larry Andrews, SPIE Press 3003, and the standard CRC Mathematical tables and formulae. All are good reference books—but with significant differences. The CRC book treats almost everything—understandably in a cursory fashion: one can even find elements of knot theory inside. Larry Andrews’s book, on the other hand, is much more limited in scope, but it does a wonderful job of teaching in a concise manner—i.e., it is closer to a textbook. The book outlined above falls in-a middle ground. It lacks the breadth of the CRC Handbook, but goes more deeply into details—yet not as exhaustively as the Andrews book. For perhaps one-half of the occasions that arise for consulting a reference work on the job, the engineer needs just that: a quantitative expression, together with a concise description of its inner workings. For such occasions, this book is highly recommended.
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