George B. Arfken (1922–2020)

As far as I remember this book was required reading for the “Special Functions” course. You could argue that this is not a pure Physics book. However, it is certainly not a pure Mathematics book, since the examples are related to Physics problems:

Vector Analysis
Group Theory
Infinite Series
Complex Algebra
Special Functions

I think that this is an awesome book. Sometimes I just read it for fun. Seriously. I can’t understand, how people can be so negative about it. Probably they were show more forced to go through the material at high speed without much help from their professors. I admit that this is not a good approach, especially given the size of the book. show less

One of the textbooks for an applied mathematics course I took in the Cornell engineering school as an undergraduate. It has good discussions of coordinate systems, tensors, and group theory.

The cookbook. Mostly old fashioned stuff like differential equations.