The seventh edition of this book (ISBN 0-534-38216-9) was released by Brooks-Cole Publishing in January 2001. For this edition, we added two new sections. The first addition is in Chapter 7 and is an introduction to the Conjugate Gradient Method, including preconditioning. In Chapter 10 we added a section on Homotopy and Continuation Methods. As is our practice, both methods are accompanied by algorithms that can be coded in a variety of languages.
Many of us teaching numerical analysis in the past few years have found that students are increasingly using a computer algebra system to perform the required calculations. This permits them to see the effects of the individual steps of a method without having to perform time-consuming computations. Because of this, we have adopted the computer algebra system Maple as our standard computation device and include many of the required Maple commands in the text.
