Undergraduate-level text emphasizes application of the theory of differential equations to problems in biology, economics, engineering, and physics.

This is a very frank and detailed account by a leading and very active mathematician of the past decades whose contributions have had an important impact in those fields where mathematics is now an integral part. It starts from his early childhood just after the First World War to his present-day positions as professor of mathematics, electrical engineering and medicine at the USC, which in itself reflects on the diversity of interests and experiences gained through the turbulent years when American mathematics and sciences established themselves on the forefront. The story traces the tortuous path Bellman followed from Brooklyn College; the University of Wisconsin to Princeton during the war years; more than a decade with the RAND Corporation; with frequent views of more than just the academic circles, including his experiences at Los Alamos on the A-bomb project.Bellman gives highly personalised views of key personalities in mathematics, physics and other areas, and his motivations and the forces that helped shape dynamic programming and other new areas which emerged as consequences of fruitful applications of mathematics.

The purpose of this book is to present some new methods in the treatment of partial differential equations. Some of these methods lead to effective numerical algorithms when combined with the digital computer. Also presented is a useful chapter on Green's functions which generalizes, after an introduction, to new methods of obtaining Green's functions for partial differential operators. Finally some very new material is presented on solving partial differential equations by Adomian's decomposition methodology. This method can yield realistic computable solutions for linear or non linear cases even for strong nonlinearities, and also for deterministic or stochastic cases - again even if strong stochasticity is involved. Some interesting examples are discussed here and are to be followed by a book dealing with frontier applications in physics and engineering. In Chapter I, it is shown that a use of positive operators can lead to monotone convergence for various classes of nonlinear partial differential equations. In Chapter II, the utility of conservation technique is shown. These techniques are suggested by physical principles. In Chapter III, it is shown that dyn~mic programming applied to variational problems leads to interesting classes of nonlinear partial differential equations. In Chapter IV, this is investigated in greater detail. In Chapter V, we show. that the use of a transformation suggested by dynamic programming leads to a new method of successive approximations.