About The Book
'Mathematics for Electrical Engineering and Computing' is a book, aimed mainly at first year university students, that concentrates on elaborating, as simply as possible, the ideas behind mathematics relevant to engineering disciplines. The focus of the examples provided reflect the fact that most engineers nowadays work in the areas of electrical, electronic, computing and software engineering. This book, however, which includes background material available on the companion website, has a much wider appeal, and provides a fascinating study of how much mathematics helps our understanding of the world around us.
If you regret the fact that the old skills of hand calculation are fast dying with the advance of computing then, 'Mathematics for Electrical Engineering and Computing' is probably not your ideal buy. If you want to understand some underlying principles behind the software apps that you use every day to do your calculations then this book will suit you exactly. For example, if you would like to learn how to calculate a very complex integral then this would certainly be an introduction and you could then move on to use the software tools available (e.g. on www.wolframalpha.com).
When I wrote the predecessor to 'Mathematics for Electrical Engineering and Computing', 'Engineering Mathematics Exposed' (pub 1994), the world of engineering was already fast evolving. However engineering mathematics textbooks had remained firmly rooted in a pre-computing past. I wrote a book that was ahead of its time and discovered that such originality is not necessarily a great feature for sales volumes but definitely a good thing for longevity of relevance.
Some of the changes made which make the book stand out from other engineering mathematics books are:
- Inclusion of background mathematics notes (now available on the companion website) so people entering university from a diversity of backgrounds have the opportunity to correct any deficiencies in their basic mathematics understanding.
- Ordering the material in the book so that it makes a coherent whole, like an unfolding story.
- Embracing material particularly relevant to digital signal processing, including z- transforms and probability analysis. This form of data analysis is important for disciplines as diverse as building control systems, acoustics, video compression, speech processing, speech recognition, digital communications, digital synthesizers, radar, sonar, financial signal processing, seismology and biomedicine.
- Inclusion of material particularly relevant for software and computing engineering including logic, propositions and predicates, graph and language theory.
About the Author
Mary Attenborough studied BSc Mathematics at Imperial College, London University and later completed her PhD there in Mathematical Physics (Solid State Theory). During this time she also tutored undergraduate engineering students in mathematics. Mary later took up work as a software engineer in the field of geophysical exploration. In 1986 she joined the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in South Bank University as a senior lecturer teaching mathematics and software engineering to undergraduates and masters students. In 1990 Mary returned to private industry where she worked as a software engineer on geophysics and petrophysics modules for Tigress (then part of Simon Engineering). In 1994 she became a computer consultant, employed mainly in the City of London before moving to Dublin in 1998. In Ireland, Mary spent two years as a software engineer in the telecommunications industry before setting up her own web design and development company, The Webbery, in County Donegal, where she now lives and works