Judging this book by its coverThanks to a
combination of mathematical imagery with graphical artistry, Wileys
have created a most attractive cover for this second edition.
Even before the book was published, a colleague in a distant
part of the world, said how much she liked it, just on the basis of the
cover. Underneath the words and the design features, there
is a picture with a meaning. The meaning concerns the (2,1)
Padé approximation to the exponential function.
When this approximation is divided by the exponential
function itself, the function of a complex variable which results is a
link between the order of accuracy of a numerical method and its
stability properties. The lines shown in the diagram are
contour lines for the real and imaginary parts of the logarithm of this
function. These are related in turn to order stars and order
arrows. To find out more, you will need to delve into the
book itself.
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