Introduction.- Part I, Background.- Part II, Core Languages.- Part III, Commercial Computing Environments.- Part IV, Distributed Computing.- Part V, Specialized Programming Environments.- References.- Index.
Einar Smith holds academic degrees in Mathematics from the Unversity of Bonn, in Economics from the University of Oslo, and in Computer Science from the University of Hamburg.
He has published a textbook on Mathematical Computability Theory, and a biography of the German computer scientist C.A. Petri. Both books have been published by Springer. In recent years he has mainly been concerned with the teaching of numerical methods at the University of Bonn, with an emphasis on computer programming.
The book provides an introduction to common programming tools and methods in numerical mathematics and scientific computing. Unlike widely used standard approaches, it does not focus on any particular language but aims to explain the key underlying concepts.
In general, new concepts are first introduced in the particularly user-friendly Python language and then transferred and expanded in various scientific programming environments from C / C ++, Julia and MATLAB to Maple. This includes different approaches to distributed computing.
The fact that different languages are studied and compared also makes the book useful for mathematicians and practitioners trying to decide which programming language to use for which purposes.