Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0821802917, Hardcover)

This volume, containing the proceedings of an international conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Mathematics of Computation, reflects the unique way in which this journal views computational mathematics as including not only numerical analysis but also computational number theory. Accordingly, the book has two parts, one for each of these two branches. The major purpose of the conference was to take stock of the current state of the field, to reflect on its recent history, and to assess future trends. This is done in substantial survey papers written by recognized experts; there are ten such surveys in the first part and four in the second. The former cover such topics as multigrid and multiresolution methods, numerical linear algebra, methods for solving differential equations, splines and their applications, optimization, and approximation methods and software for special functions. The survey papers in the second part deal with the precomputer history of integer factorization and primality testing, as well as with some of the modern techniques of factorization and with computational techniques in analytic number theory and deterministic algorithms and their complexity in algebraic number theory. A glimpse into the very active contemporary scene is provided by the forty-six short contributed papers. With extensive bibliographic references, a detailed index, and language accessible to a wide audience, this book is an authoritative resource in the field of computational mathematics.