FOAM. This acronym has been used for over ?fty years at Rensselaer to designate an upper-division course entitled, Foundations of Applied Ma- ematics. This course was started by George Handelman in 1956, when he came to Rensselaer from the Carnegie Institute of Technology. His objective was to closely integrate mathematical and physical reasoning, and in the p- cess enable students to obtain a qualitative understanding of the world we live in. FOAM was soon taken over by a young faculty member, Lee Segel. About this time a similar course, Introduction to Applied Mathematics, was introduced by Chia-Ch’iao Lin at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together Lin and Segel, with help from Handelman, produced one of the landmark textbooks in applied mathematics, Mathematics Applied to - terministic Problems in the Natural Sciences. This was originally published in 1974, and republished in 1988 by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, in their Classics Series. This textbook comes from the author teaching FOAM over the last few years. In this sense, it is an updated version of the Lin and Segel textbook.
The objective of this textbook is the construction, analysis, and interpretation of mathematical models to help us understand the world we live in. Rather than follow a case study approach it develops the mathematical and physical ideas that are fundamental in understanding contemporary problems in science and engineering. Science evolves, and this means that the problems of current interest continually change.
What does not change as quickly is the approach used to derive the relevant mathematical models, and the methods used to analyze the models. Consequently, this book is written in such a way as to establish the mathematical ideas underlying model development independently of a specific application. This does not mean applications are not considered, they are, and connections with experiment are a staple of this book.
The book, as well as the individual chapters, is written in such a way that the material becomes more sophisticated as you progress. This provides some flexibility in how the book is used, allowing consideration for the breadth and depth of the material covered.
Moreover, there are a wide spectrum of exercises and detailed illustrations that significantly enrich the material. Students and researchers interested in mathematical modelling in mathematics, physics, engineering and the applied sciences will find this text useful.
