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| Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula: Cures Many Mathematical Ills | 
| Author: Paul J. Nahin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $19.76
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 82088
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 404
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4
ISBN: 0691118221
Dewey Decimal Number: 512.788
EAN: 9780691118222
ASIN: 0691118221
Publication Date: April 10, 2006
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 15 | | NEXT » |
 Great stuff, but what's the point? July 20, 2008
I came to this book because I enjoyed The Story of the Square Root of Minus One, another book by Paul Nahin. This book is of a very different nature: unlike that other book, this one is light on concepts and heavy on calculations.
I enjoyed it quite a bit, however, hence the 4 stars, because I like complicated-looking integrals, but let me be frank I could not help thinking throughout: what's the point? (and do I deserve to be treated to so many typos?)
What's the point? It shows many uses of Euler's formula, but without explaining why we should care. A couple of chapters are devoted to Fourier series and transforms: again, what's the point? Towards the end, Nahin writes something to the effect that he has "avoided giving physical interpretations to the mathematical calculations" and that's precisely the problem: until the end of the book where there are clear references to things like electricity and other waves, we are never told (or reminded) why these clever manipulations are important.
It was shocking not to see any reference to the Riemann hypothesis and zeta function, which are perhaps the most beautiful example of the use of Euler's formula.
To Nahin's credit, he goes through the calculations step by step, so that if you do care (for some reason) then you can follow pretty much the whole thing without breaking a sweat (Nahin did the hard work). But I will confess that I did skip a few pages here and there: my eyes and brains got tired and the nagging thought came, well, what's the point?
Thoroughly recommended, however.
 Warning July 14, 2008
Don't buy this book without buying the companion i book by Paul Nahin. This is clearly meant as a supplement to the i book. Does not stand alone except maybe in the applications of the formula.
I gave this book 5 stars because I had no basis for judgment. The author clearly states in the beginning of the book that this book has many interesting things he couldn't fit in the first one.
Dr Euler's Fabulous Formula May 4, 2008
A very interesting book. I am a retired Electrical Engineer and hence find this book particularly interesting. Not for the faint hearted as it contains a very large amount of complex mathematics. Overall, very good.
 Catchy title and cover graphic but reads like a textbook January 22, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
After the first few pages I got the feeling that this book was based on notes from a class that Nahin had taught. And sure enough, the acknowledgement section confirmed my suspicion (p. 375). Now, on its face, this isn't necessarily good or necessarily bad. But it can give you a hint of what the book might be like: the course notes were from two, third-year electrical engineering classes on systems engineering. And that's what the book reads like.
It's not what I expected with a title like Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula. I doubt that's what Nahin's classes were called. The title is probably the doing of the publisher's marketing department, not Nahin. In addition, I think the title is actually misleading. I didn't do a page count but it seems like more pages are devoted to Fourier analysis, as opposed to anything else.
I have only a layperson's interest in math books, perhaps caused by having the worse calculus teacher in the universe. Even so, I should have looked for detailed reviews, rather than being seduced by the title. If I had, I might have known what to expect. But I didn't. I bought the book from Amazon but on the basis of an ad in Science News, I think it was. So I now have a very clean, once-read copy of this book for sale!
On a topic I don't believe is covered by other reviewers is Nahin's rant about Jackson Pollock's drip paintings as he attempts to discuss the beauty of theories and equations (p. xix of the Preface). That's why I bought the book in the first place: I was pursuing my interest in the clear and intriguing beauty of Euler's Fabulous Formula. However, I nearly stopped reading only a few pages in after Nahin's incredibly cliched statement: ..."but anybody who can observe the result of throwing paint on canvas--what two-year olds routinely do in ten thousand day-care centers every day (my gosh, what I do every time I pain my ceiling)--and call the outcome art, much less beautiful art, is delusional or a least deeply confused (in my humble opinion)". Nahin says he places Norman Rockwell far above Pollock as an artist.
He doesn't leave it at that. In a footnote (p. 348), when discussing Pollock's use of a can with a hole in the bottom, he says: "a gravity-driven mechanical system did all of the `creative' work". That's somewhat like me saying that a friction device (Nahin's pencil?) was responsible for whatever "creative" work might be discovered in his book. (As an aside, the footnotes are enjoyable. I liked them as much as the text itself.)
Perhaps Nahin thought it was OK to put this screed in the Preface because it was, as he says, just his "opinion". The fact is, both Pollock and Rockwell are fabulous in their own right and this kind of reasoning made me distrust ANY judgment Nahin might make about beauty, mathematical or otherwise. Having done a little of both professional level science and art, and even a smattering of math (if you can count probability and statistics), I would agree with Nahin's wife, he is indeed a "cultural Neanderthal" (Preface, p. xix). Perhaps even a mathematical one. And to that list I would add, the stereotype of a grumpy, old fashioned.... On second though, I'm not going to say it. I have acquaintances that fortunately do not fit that stereotype.
Least I seem totally negative, Nahin does explain why Euler deserves an enormous amount or respect and admiration and I liked his explanation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (p. 255) and why Pi shows up in such strange places (p. 359-60).
So I give Nahin a 3 and his publisher a 1 (for misleading marketing). I think that's an arithmetic mean of 2, if my friction device serves me correctly.
An excellence introductory book on advanced mathematics such as Euler's Identity, Irrationalioty, Fourier Series September 21, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
The primary topic of Nahin's "Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula" is the complex number or more appropriately the Euler's identity: e power to (it) = cos(t) + isin(t). Nahin called this book the second half of his complex number series. The first book in the series is named "An Imaginary Tale: The Story of square root of minus one." The second book is called "Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula." The primary topics of the second book are: Fourier series, which is covered on Chapter 4; Fourier Integrals on Chapter 5; the application of complex numbers on electronics Chapter 6.
The book has six chapters, which contains both pure and applied mathematics materials. Other than the three chapters mentioned above, the other three chapters are (i) Complex Numbers, (ii) Vector Trips, and (iii) The Irrationality of pi square. Chapter one is about the assortment of non elementary complex numbers such as applying complex number on obtaining the sum of a real series. Chapter three provides a detail proof of the irrationality of the number pi square using Euler's Identity. On the applied side: Chapter two demonstrates the application of complex number on mathematical modeling. Since Nahin is an eminent electrical engineering professor, his book also provides plenty of material on (a) partial differential equations (PDE) such as wave equation on chapter four, and (b) electrical engineering material such as baseband, carrying frequencies, antennas, radio receivers and speech scrambler on chapter six.
This is an excellence introductory book not only on pure complex numbers usage in mathematics such as summing a series but also on the usage of PDE, Fourier series, and Fourier Integral in physics and engineering.
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