Selections from the adorable introduction to "Chebyshev and Fourier Spectral Methods"
This volume is not an almanac of unrelated facts, even though many sections and especially the appendices can be used to look up things, but rather is a travel guide to the Chebyshev City where the individual algorithms and identities interact to form a community. In this mathematical village, the special functions are special friends. A differential equation is a pseudospectral matrix in drag. The program structure of grids point/basisset/collocation matrix is as basic to life as cloud/rain/river/sea.
It is not that spectral concepts are difficult, but rather that they link together as the components of an intellectual and computational ecology. Those who come to the course with no previous adventures in numerical analysis will be like urban children abandoned in the wilderness. Such innocents will learn far more than hardened veterans of the arithmurgical wars, but emerge from the forests with a lot more bruises.
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The writing style is an uneasy mixture of two influences. In private life, the author has written fourteen published science fiction and mystery short stories. When one has described zeppelins jousting in the heavy atmosphere of another world or a stranded explorer alone on an artificial toroidal planet, it is difficult to write with the expected scientific dullness.
Nonetheless, I have not been too proud to forget most of the wise precepts I learned in college English: the book makes heavy use of both the passive voice and the editorial “we”. When I was still a postdoc, a kindly journal editor took me in hand, and circled every single “I” in red. The scientific abhorrence of the personal pronoun, the active voice, and lively writing is as hypocritical as the Victorian horror of “breast” and “pregnant”. Nevertheless, most readers are so used to the anti-literature of science that what would pass for good writing elsewhere would be too distracting. So I have done my best to write a book that is not about its style but about its message.
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When I was an undergraduate - ah, follies of youth - I had a quasi-mystical belief in the power of brute force computation.
Fortunately, I learned better before I could do too much damage. Joel Primack (to him be thanks) taught me John Wheeler ’s First Moral Principle: Never do a calculation until you already know the answer.
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It is all too easy to equate multiple windows with hard work, and multiple contour plots with progress. Nevertheless, a scientist by definition is one who listens for the voice of God. It is part of the fallen state of man that He whispers.
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The Heart of Africa has lost its mystery; the planets of Tau Ceti are currently unknown and unreachable. Nevertheless, the rise of digital computers has given this generation its galleons and astrolabes. The undiscovered lands exist, in one sense, only as intermittent electric rivers in dendritic networks of copper and silicon, invisible as the soul. And yet the mystery of scientific computing is that its new worlds over the water, wrought only of numbers and video images, are as real as the furrowed brow of the first Cro-Magnon who was mystified by the stars, and looked for a story.
It is not that spectral concepts are difficult, but rather that they link together as the components of an intellectual and computational ecology. Those who come to the course with no previous adventures in numerical analysis will be like urban children abandoned in the wilderness. Such innocents will learn far more than hardened veterans of the arithmurgical wars, but emerge from the forests with a lot more bruises.
...
The writing style is an uneasy mixture of two influences. In private life, the author has written fourteen published science fiction and mystery short stories. When one has described zeppelins jousting in the heavy atmosphere of another world or a stranded explorer alone on an artificial toroidal planet, it is difficult to write with the expected scientific dullness.
Nonetheless, I have not been too proud to forget most of the wise precepts I learned in college English: the book makes heavy use of both the passive voice and the editorial “we”. When I was still a postdoc, a kindly journal editor took me in hand, and circled every single “I” in red. The scientific abhorrence of the personal pronoun, the active voice, and lively writing is as hypocritical as the Victorian horror of “breast” and “pregnant”. Nevertheless, most readers are so used to the anti-literature of science that what would pass for good writing elsewhere would be too distracting. So I have done my best to write a book that is not about its style but about its message.
...
When I was an undergraduate - ah, follies of youth - I had a quasi-mystical belief in the power of brute force computation.
Fortunately, I learned better before I could do too much damage. Joel Primack (to him be thanks) taught me John Wheeler ’s First Moral Principle: Never do a calculation until you already know the answer.
...
It is all too easy to equate multiple windows with hard work, and multiple contour plots with progress. Nevertheless, a scientist by definition is one who listens for the voice of God. It is part of the fallen state of man that He whispers.
...
The Heart of Africa has lost its mystery; the planets of Tau Ceti are currently unknown and unreachable. Nevertheless, the rise of digital computers has given this generation its galleons and astrolabes. The undiscovered lands exist, in one sense, only as intermittent electric rivers in dendritic networks of copper and silicon, invisible as the soul. And yet the mystery of scientific computing is that its new worlds over the water, wrought only of numbers and video images, are as real as the furrowed brow of the first Cro-Magnon who was mystified by the stars, and looked for a story.