Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Dr. Mahajan's has been teaching this sort of course for a while now and has been generous enough to make almost all his material available through his course web pages at MIT for The Art of Approximation and Street-Fighting Mathematics. If you want to preview this book I suggest you check those websites out.
The book is reminiscent of Consider a Spherical Cow by Harte, The Art and Craft of Problem-Solving by Zeitz, and How to Solve It by Polya. Although much of the book focuses on how to avoid doing integrals and taking derivatives, it presumes the reader is familiar with calculus. In this respect it's different from the books I just mentioned and other ones out there on approximation, e.g. Guesstimation. The example problems are diverse, most are borrowed from physics, geometry, and math, with a few are that are Fermi-type "real-world" scenarios.
My main complaint is that the book is so short. I wish the author had combined this book with material from his Order of Magnitude Physics and Art of Approximation courses, which are marvelous not only for the problem-solving on display but also for the physics content.
This type of book addresses a serious gap in American math-science education. Learning techniques for approximation allows one to tackle the sort of ill-posed problems one is most likely to encounter in the real-world. It is also intimately tied to recognizing the salient features of a problem, such as the physical principles involved in a physics problem or the most questionable assumption in an economic model. Street-Fighting Math deserves a wide readership and will hopefully influence other math-science teachers and authors.
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An antidote to mathematical rigor mortis, teaching how to guess answerswithout needing a proof or an exact calculation.
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