A Practical Introduction to Numerical Methods for Materials Scientists and Engineers - Paperback

by David J. Keffer (Author)

This book presents an introduction to numerical methods targeted at undergraduate materials scientists and engineers. What we hope to achieve through this text is a situation where the model formulation proceeds without regard for the ease of numerical solution. Once the model is rigorously formulated, the appropriate numerical solution is then identified. Thus the science guides the numerical techniques, rather than the other way around. The philosophy espoused in this book is to equip the student with a compact but broadly applicable set of practical problem-solving tools such that the student emerges at the end of the course with the belief, "If I can formulate the problem as a mathematical model, I can solve it."

Author Biography

David J. Keffer was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He pursued a technical education earning a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. After a year as a post-doctoral scholar at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he began his career as an engineering professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he remains today, leading a computational research group interested in materials relevant to the pursuit of sustainable energy. He has taught an applied statistics and numerical methods for engineers for many years. He has published about 100 technical papers in archival journals. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant and spent a year (2010-11) at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea.