All the Mathematics You Missed But Need to Know for Graduate School

Author(s): Garrity Thomas A.
Date     : January 15, 2002



There's no doubt about it this book designed for people who want to learn some real math. It doesn't take, as the title and description might lead you to believe, a "Math for Engineers" approach.
Each chapter covers, in the span of 10 or 15 pages, what would normally be an entire semester's worth of material, and as a result, is quite dense -- there are alot of ideas crammed onto each page. But unlike traditional advanced math books (which are notoriously dense) the focus is more on developing intuitions than on long strings of equations.
An important strength is that every chapter ends with suggestions on textbooks in that chapter's subject. This turns out to be quite helpful, since one can't reasonably expect to learn everything important about any of these subjects from a brief chapter in any book.
I can envision three main ways in which this book might be useful: First, in combination with one or more of the books in listed in the bibliography for learning a new subject. Second, on its own for review of topics you've seen before. Third, as a reference for "basic" definitions and theorems, as in: "What's a Hilbert space again?"
Overall, this will be a good book to have around, but not a substitute for real study.