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Pretty cool. Out of curiosity, who stashes these books (the hardcopy version) on their bookshelves and why? Am very interested to know



I have my dear copy of Abramowitz and Stegun on the bookshelf next to my desk and I refer to it nearly weekly. E.g., yesterday I had a postdoc asking me about a strange numerical scheme for computing derivatives using five points that he found, and looking at the appropriate page on the handbook we could easily find its name, history, and main properties; and thanks to that, understand whether a different scheme would be more appropriate in his case.

Then, during some of my courses on numerical analysis, I like to brandish the book in front of the students, and explain to them how awesome it is.


I can't claim to have it on my bookshelf anymore, but DID have the original hardcopy on my bookshelf for many years back in the 70's and early 80's when I was programming some low-level math libraries and needed to refer to some approximation techniques (e.g., Chebyshev for logarithms).

EDIT: oops, just realized that you were referring to a later version of the classic. I was referring to Abramowitz and Stegun's Handbook of Mathematical Functions with formulas, graphs, and mathematical tables (1964).


University libraries... out of tradition, but not for much longer??




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