Mathematical Methods for Physicists, Sixth Edition: A Comprehensive Guide |  | Authors: George B. Arfken, Hans J. Weber
Publisher: Academic Press
List Price: $120.00
Buy New: $67.95
as of 11/25/2009 04:09 CST details
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Rating:  60 reviews
Sales Rank: 132372
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 6
Pages: 1200
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 7.9 x 2
ISBN: 0120598760
Dewey Decimal Number: 510
EAN: 9780120598762
ASIN: 0120598760
Publication Date: July 5, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This best-selling title provides in one handy volume the essential mathematical tools and techniques used to solve problems in physics. It is a vital addition to the bookshelf of any serious student of physics or research professional in the field. The authors have put considerable effort into revamping this new edition.
* Updates the leading graduate-level text in mathematical physics
* Provides comprehensive coverage of the mathematics necessary for advanced study in physics and engineering
* Focuses on problem-solving skills and offers a vast array of exercises
* Clearly illustrates and proves mathematical relations
New in the Sixth Edition:
* Updated content throughout, based on users' feedback
* More advanced sections, including differential forms and the elegant forms of Maxwell's equations
* A new chapter on probability and statistics
* More elementary sections have been deleted
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 60
 An excellent reference text. November 20, 2009
Almon D. Ing (Austin, TX)
I am a graduate student who studies perceptual systems. My research interests are neuroscience, vision, statistics, classification, and machine learning.
While this text is not directly in my line of research, it offers a superb and comprehensive mathematical treatment of many topics in physics. Such treatments are useful to researchers from other disciplines.
In statistics, I could not find a treatment of tensors, spherical harmonics, and orthogonal polynomials (as they relate to multivariate probability distributions). I was forced to turn to this textbook for the Physics-related treatment. I soon discovered that it is a treasure-trove of knowledge. It is beautifully written and accessible to the mathematically inclined reader without proper training in Physics. (I took AP Physics in high school -- and that was it.)
This is a very thick text. A great reference for many topics.
 Handy reference, terrible textbook October 25, 2009
Ethan P. Rubin
Rating this "textbook" is virtually impossible, so please take my two star rating with a grain of salt. There is too much content to thoroughly review it all and, as many others have said, the value of this book depends greatly on how one uses it. I can say one thing for certain: this book does not deserve five stars.
I bought this book for an introductory graduate level physics course. Our professor said there are no good books for the course but this one was the "least bad". I was initially impressed by the breadth of material covered in the text. I still am somewhat impressed, but I see now that there are major holes. For example, there is a section in the book on Hermitian and unitary matrices. The two kinds of matrices are defined in about a page, but the rest of the section (three pages) is devoted to a whirlwind tour of Pauli and Dirac matrices that would make all but the steeliest physicist's head spin. In fact, unless I'm sorely mistaken, it is never explicitly stated whether the Pauli and Dirac matrices are Hermitian or unitary. An astute reader can discover that for himself by inspection, but I would prefer the authors state it so that their discussion ties in with the section's heading.
The following section is on the diagonalization of matrices. I was appalled to find *no* clear mathematical expression of diagonalization-- i.e., expressing a matrix as a product of a matrix of its eigenvectors, a diagonal matrix of its eigenvalues, and the inverse of the first matrix. Instead, they opt to cover examples such as the moment of inertia matrix, Hermitian and anti-Hermitian matrices, and matrix exponentials. The moment of inertia tensor is explicitly diagonalized, but this is only a special case. In two pages, I see *nothing* on the diagonalization of Hermitian matrices, which is a shame because it *could* be tied in very well with the section. Once again, an astute reader who already has a strong background in math and physics could probably put all the pieces together, but that should not be necessary. This spotty coverage renders some of the problems at the end of each chapter essentially impossible to do. I find myself often citing properties that should have been covered in the book but weren't.
As I said, my two star rating has some caveats. First, we have only covered a few chapters so far, so it would not be fair to judge the entire book based on such a small sample (perhaps one of the authors is far better than the other). Second, despite what I've said, there is quite a bit of material in this book and at least some parts of some chapters are quite accessible and valuable. If you are a well-versed graduate student, post-doc, or professor, I can easily imagine this being a handy supplement to have on your bookshelf. As a struggling student, however, I cannot recommend this book, especially as part of a class.
Final verdict: two stars, plus or minus two stars.
forced to agree with the students October 2, 2009
Bruce D. Wilner (Alexandria, VA USA)
With due apologies to the "practicing industry physicist," who must think that students are just lazy muttonheads flip-flopping to class so they can flirt with adjoining babes, this book is truly quite poor. Oh, it certainly looks very boss on one's shelf, and those tastefully formatted integral equations bursting with funny symbols and Greek letters really turn the grandchildren's heads. But this book is utterly useless for teaching mathematics. It offers the worst of Jeffreys and Jeffreys--profoundly overdone conciseness, lack of anything resembling practical explanation, few if any examples--and none of the good features of that I'm-not-sure-why-it's-a-classic classic. You would do better to combine Kreyszig (good book but less comprehensive coverage) and Churchill & Brown (excellent coverage of complex variables and conformal mappings) with Lanczos (all sorts of great stuff found neither in Kreyszig nor in Arfken & Weber); then look into Collin on microwave circuits for a superb treatment of Green's functions and, if you're bold, Spain or Gurtin for something on tensors (though you really need a good TEACHER to learn THAT). Relegate Arfken & Weber to doorstop duty: it will perform admirably.
Decent Graduate Text October 1, 2009
Robert E. Yerks
This text is a decent text for graduate level mathematical physics. It would be a little over the top for most undergraduate students. However, comparing this to the text I used at the undergraduate level I like this one better. All in all I find this to be a decent text. The problems are moderately to really challenging but ultimately rewarding.
 Mathematical Methods for Physicists September 21, 2009
Tracy Tuttle (Nowhere)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have been a physics professor now for nearly 18 years and this is one of the worst TEXTbooks I have seen. It is essentially a large reference book for those that already have mastery of the topics and is of very little use as a textbook.
Basic pedagogical problems abound such as: 1) Topics in many chapter sections are dependent upon other sections perhaps many chapters ahead of the current topic... and those referenced sections are in turn dependent upon other chapter sections elsewhere in the text. This leaves one to wonder if the Authors had meaningful structure of the text in mind when they wrote it. 2) There are few useful examples for students. Most of the useful information is left to the student to work out as exercises without textbook guidance. 3) Section problems are unclear as to what the Authors are asking and since students are largely left to their own devices to discover crucial concepts, the text becomes largely irrelevant.
This book is a reference NOT a textbook. Students will need to have other well written Textbooks on hand such as Mary Boas's "Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences to make sense of the material THEN go back to this book once they have mastered a topic to see if they can glean what the authors intend.
In physics, there are "status symbol" textbooks that, unfortunately, departments adopt to try to impress others of their rigor, high level and expertise. These books do little, if anything, to help students learn and therefore are poor textbooks. This is one of those books.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 60
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