This is an interactive electronic textbook, composed of nine Maple documents that is available at http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/research/chemistry.html.
The objective of this book is to teach the concepts and principles of all mathematics that a professor of chemistry would expect or hope that his or her students would learn in courses typically instructed by a professor of mathematics, with implementation with software for symbolic computation or computer algebra. From an emphasis on the concepts and principles arises an expectation that a student might derive a more profound understanding of the mathematics than in traditional courses in which emphasis is placed on a student's capability to solve exercises; the implementation of the mathematical operations with powerful mathematical software means that the exercises are not restricted to trivial cases but are extensible to real applications. On such a basis a student is prepared and equipped to treat significant chemical problems.
Although the title specifies Mathematics for Chemistry, in fact most content of chapters 0 to 9 involve pure mathematics, but some examples and exercises are based on chemical data. For this reason this book is equally useful for students of science and engineering in any branch, with the proviso that further examples and exercises should be devised to illuminate those fields. Because of the interactive nature of the content of this electronic textbook, it provides an effective tool for self study, but typical courses in almost a traditional format can be based on this textbook; supplementing with traditional textbooks as desired, an instructor can explain and discuss the mathematical concepts and principles in a lecture setting accompanied by intensive demonstrations with this software, complemented with a supervised practice session in a computer laboratory; likely two hours per week of each component, supplemented by as much further independent practice and study as each student requires, would enable an optimal coverage of all topics from arithmetic to optimization with about 500 hours of total duration of formal classes, corresponding to three semesters or 1.5 years.
