Automatic Differentiation of Algorithms: Theory, Implementation, and Application (Andreas Griewank and George F. Corliss, eds.)

Those ofyou whoknow Ken Meyerand Dick Hall may have already purchased this book. For those of you who don’t know these authors, I’d like to give you my impressions. The principal author, Meyer, has long been a leading researcher in dynamics. His writing style is careful, complete, accurate, and down to earth. He is a mathematician and this means that he is vitally concerned with giving careful definitions and establishing true statements. He avoids abstraction for its own sake, but he is comfortable using it when necessary. He tells you what is really going on. Hall is also a leading researcher in dynamical systems. His work has been primarily devoted to the study of twist maps, the subject of his chapter of this book. His instinct is to simplify, to go to the very heart of a problem, and to explain it in a way that conveys insight. His exposition is outstanding. In their preface the authors describe the book this way: