A First Course in the Numerical Analysis of Differential Equations

Appendix

Bluffer’s guide to useful mathematics

This is not a review of undergraduate mathematics or a distillation of the wisdom of many lecture courses into a few pages. Certainly, nobody should use it to understand new material. Mathematics is not learnt from crib-sheets and brief compendia but by careful study of definitions, theorems and – most importantly, perhaps – proofs, by elucidating the intuition behind ideas and grasping the interconnectedness between what might seem disparate concepts at first glance. There are no shortcuts and no ...