journal
of science education
Book Reviews
Environmental Chemistry
New Age International Publishers
New Delhi, pp.458, 2002.
The book under review is a comprehensive treatment of the important facets of chemistry related to the environment. It contains two parts. Part I, consisting of 13 chapters spread over 376 pages, deals with the atmosphere. Part II, entitled ‘Water, Earth and Environ-ment’ has 10 chapters spread over 458 pages. The two parts together constitute a large source book on the subject. The author has collected a lot of useful information and data that are presented in the form of tables, schemes, diagrams, equations, etc. and some colour photographs are also included. The effort he has expended in this matter is highly commendable. He has dealt with the behaviour and fate of the important polluting chemicals and their effect on environment. An admirable and useful feature of this book is that each topic is preceded by a good account of the theory and principles of the background chemistry, which helps the reader compre-hend the subject easily.
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Normed Linear Spaces
Hindustan Book Agency, India
June 2003, 304 pages, Hardback, Rs.350/- (India only)
US$38.00 (outside India)
In the book under review, the author makes the point that in this approach the idea of a derivative as a linear map may fail to be emphasized. Perhaps as a consequence, the student may not develop a good grasp of fundamental theorems such as the inverse and implicit function theorems.
Also, there are clear advantages of a coordinate-free approach: Apart from clarifying the meanings of derivatives of all orders (as multilinear maps), one can generalize calculus to infinite-dimensional spaces with little extra effort. The latter theory has several applications in partial differential equations and calculus of variations.
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