Complex variables and applications

What Hacker News says

1. orbitingplutoSep 2018
   All fair criticisms, but I was recollecting on reading Boyce & DiPrima where the Laplace was relegated to IVP.

   I was left with feeling that I had only learned yet another trick until I read Churchill & Brown's Complex Variables and Applications.

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2. BostonianSep 2021
   Physics -- paper and pencil, in the late 1980s, at Harvard. Books such as Purcell, "Electricity and Magnetism", Reif, "Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics", Liboff, "Introductory Quantum Mechanics", Sakurai, "Modern Quantum Mechanics", Ashcroft and Mermin, "Solid State Physics", Brown and Churchill, "Complex Variables and Applications", and "Fourier Series and Boundary Value Problems".
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3. scytheJul 2020
   >What would you have appreciated having been given at that age?

   I remember getting God Created The Integers when I was a teenager and... not finishing it. I also got a copy of Brown & Churchill's Complex Variables and Applications and spent hundreds of hours on it. As a teenager, I preferred textbooks with problem sets to popularizations. (I still do.) Of course, this was [complex] analysis, so it doesn't qualify.

   One book which is fully technical but also entertaining by way of the subject matter, and which was inspiring to me around 14-15, was Kenneth Falconer's Fractal Geometry:

   https://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Geometry-Mathematical-Foundat...

   Of course, at that age, I didn't understand what Falconer meant by describing the Cantor set as "uncountable", or what a "topological dimension" was, but I was able to grasp the gist of many of the arguments in the book because it is very well illustrated and does not rely too much on abstruse algebra techniques. Some people don't enjoy reading a book if they don't fully understand it, but I liked that kind of thing. As I got older and learned more, I started to be able to understand the technical arguments in the book as well.

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4. juiceandjuiceMay 2011
   I had a different problem, I found that word density increases 10 fold, but symbol density and proofs go down as you go through it.

   My favorite example to use is this: Complex Variables and Applications by Brown and Churchill. This book has been in print for 70 years or something, and it's somewhere around 400 pages in the current edition I believe. My professor I did research for had a early 80s edition, and it had almost 100 less pages than the current edition. There wasn't really anything new added between the versions (chapters are only about 5-10 pages, so there's something like 65 of them) I ended up using mine for the problems and his for reading because I have ADHD, and the wordiness absolutely kills me. Symbols and relationships are much more meaningful to me than words describing them. The real nightmare with the ADHD sets in because of the break in context when you have to switch between two or three pages to find the next theorem, formula or proof.

   I retook that class twice.

   On the other hand, I utterly and completely rocked my Advanced Electrodynamics course, outscoring even the graduate students, in a course which even made use of the stuff we were learning in Complex Variables (as well as PDEs and all that fun stuff) Why? I had a crazy russian professor who hated all the current textbooks (I'm looking at you, Griffiths) for the same reason that I hated textbooks, too much words and not enough symbols. So he wrote his own notes to every lesson and made his own homework. He said he originally wrote those notes when he first came here, and his english was worse, so there's little or no explanation, just proofs -- math and symbols. A few of these would span two pages, and very rarely three, but there wasn't the context break you get in many college level books, just beautiful math and lots of intermediate steps. The intermediate steps, almost never provided in most textbook proofs, really help the visual learners like me and provide stepping stones for the inevitable manipulation you will perform with those equations in your homework and on tests.

   I still have all his notes, I want to bind them up some day when I get a chance.

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5. juiceandjuiceDec 2010
   This is cool, although I thought it was going to be something different.

   One of my biggest pet peeves with ADHD trying to work on a Physics/Math degree was the excessive wordiness of books. I generally have a photographic and methodic memory, and so many proofs have tons and tons of words in them.

   Oddly enough, I got along best with the older russian professors. I talked with one of my professors about this. I guess most of them had been taught in a much less wordy matter, and taught with even less words because English wasn't their primary language.

   There's a few books that have been around forever, and they have a completely different level of readability between the editions. The Churchill/Brown book of Complex Variables and Applications has added something like 100+ pages of wordiness to the book since the 60's edition.

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