Applied Calculus for the Managerial, Life, and Social Sciences

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Soo T. Tan, Professor of Mathematics at Stonehill College, has published numerous papers in Optimal Control Theory and Numerical Analysis. He received his S.B. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his M.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles. "By the time I started writing the first of what turned out to be a series of textbooks in mathematics for students in the managerial, life, and social sciences, I had quite a few years of experience teaching mathematics to non-mathematics majors. One of the most important lessons I learned from my early experience teaching these courses is that many of the students come into these courses with some degree of apprehension. This awareness led to the intuitive approach I have adopted in all of my texts. As you will see, I try to introduce each abstract mathematical concept through an example drawn from a common, real-life experience. Once the idea has been conveyed, I then proceed to make it precise, thereby assuring that no mathematical rigor is lost in this intuitive treatment of the subject. Another lesson I learned from my students is that they have a much greater appreciation of the material if the applications are drawn from their fields of interest and from situations that occur in the real world. This is one reason you will see so many exercises in my texts that are modeled on data gathered from newspapers, magazines, journals, and other media. Whether it be the ups and downs of the stock market, the growth of HMOs in the U.S., the solvency of the Social Security system, the budget deficit, the AIDS epidemic, or the growth of the Internet, I weave topics of current interest into my examples and exercises, to keep the book relevant to all of my readers."