Introduction to Modern Mathematical Computing

Thirty years ago mathematical, as opposed to applied numerical, computation was difficult to perform and so relatively little used. Three threads changed that: the emergence of the personal computer; the discovery of fiber-optics and the consequent development of the modern internet; and the building of the Three &quote;M's&quote; Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.We intend to persuade that Mathematica and other similar tools are worth knowing, assuming only that one wishes to be a mathematician, a mathematics educator, a computer scientist, an engineer or scientist, or anyone else who wishes/needs to use mathematics better. We also hope to explain how to become an &quote;experimental mathematician&quote; while learning to be better at proving things. To accomplish this our material is divided into three main chapters followed by a postscript. These cover elementary number theory, calculus of one and several variables, introductory linear algebra, and visualization and interactive geometric computation.