The Nature of Mathematical Modeling

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1. dagwMay 2017
   You're talking about a pretty massive field. That being said The Nature of Mathematical Modeling by Neil Gershenfeld might be what you're looking for. Each chapter is a short (15-25 page) introduction to one common tool in applied mathematics. In that space you'll get an overview of when you might want to use that technique, a brief description of the basic mathematical theory underlying the method and a few examples of how it can be applied.

   Of course you won't learn enough about any topic to be able to actually tackle any but the most trivial of problems, but you will come away with a good understanding of which technique you should use for which kind of problem and have a good enough of a basis to be able to understand the more advanced books on the given topics. Each chapter also ends with a recommendation of 3-4 books which you can check out if you want to dig deeper into that particular topic.

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2. kellegousJun 2015
   Neil Gershenfeld is responsible for two of the best courses at MIT: "How to Make (almost) Anything" and "The Nature of Mathematical Modeling". Neither are compatible with healthy sleep habits, but both are transformative. I took NMM and, to this day, one my biggest regrets is never taking "How to Make (almost) Anything."
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3. ramanujanOct 2009
   Summary books like this are great as long as you know you're not an expert by the time you finish them. The goal is to let you know what you don't know, and to help you recognize a problem that would be easily solved by one of these languages (which would then spur deeper learning of the language).

   Reminds me of one of my favorite books ever, Gershenfeld's "The Nature of Mathematical Modeling".

   http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Mathematical-Modeling-Neil-Gers...

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4. starkfistAug 2010
   For the past 10 years I have been building what I call "infrastructure" software. A mixture of systems level software, web software, sysadmin scripts. If I were to get a job at Google, my title would likely be "SRE." I would like to stop doing this.

   I have a math degree, and I would like to move into a more analytical role, where I use programming to find the answers to complicated questions. What books and online resources (iTunes courses, web sites, etc) are most useful for learning more about how to do this? Right now I'm looking at "the nature of mathematical modeling" by Neil Gershenfeld, and Numerical Recipes in C. Any other advice?

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