Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham, R. P. Feynman (Preface by)

From the Publisher

This radical first course on complex analysis brings a beautiful and powerful subject to life by consistently using geometry (not calculation) as the means of explanation. Aimed at undergraduate students in mathematics, physics, and engineering, the book's intuitive explanations, lack of advanced prerequisites, and consciously user-friendly prose style will help students to master the subject more readily than was previously possible. The key to this is the book's use of new geometric arguments in place of the standard calculational ones. These geometric arguments are communicated with the aid of hundreds of diagrams of a standard seldom encountered in mathematical works. A new approach to a classical topic, this work will be of interest to students in mathematics, physics, and engineering, as well as to professionals in these fields.

Times Higher Education Supplement

Newton would have approved....a fascinating and refreshing look at a familiar subject....It is essential reading for anybody with any interest at all in this absorbing area of mathematics.

Mathematical Reviews

This informal style is excellently judged and works extremely well...Many of the arguments presented will be new even to experts, and the book will be of great interest to professionals working in either complex analysis or in some field where complex analysis is used.

Mathematical Gazette

I can only describe this book as amazing...it is not an exaggeration to say that there are gems in every section...even familiar facts are frequently explained in refreshingly new ways in this wonderful book....If your budget limits you to buying only one mathematics book in a year then make sure that this is the one that you buy.

What People Are Saying

Ian Stewart
One of the saddest developments in school mathematics has been the downgrading of the visual for the formal. I'm not lamenting the loss of traditional Euclidean geometry, despite its virtues, because it too emphasised stilted formalities. But to replace our rich visual intuition by silly games with 2 x 2 matrices has always seemed to me to be the height of folly. It is therefore a special pleasure to see Tristan Needham's Visual Complex Analysis with its elegantly illustrated visual approach. Yes, he has 2 x 2 matrices --- but his are interesting.

Roger Penrose
Visual Complex Analysis is a delight, and a book after my own heart. By his innovative and exclusive use of the geometrical perspective, Tristan Needham uncovers many surprising and largely unappreciated aspects of the beauty of complex analysis.

Paul Zorn
Delivers what its title promises, and more: an engaging, broad, thorough, and often deep, development of undergraduate complex analysis and related areas (non-Euclidean geometry, harmonic functions, etc.) from a geometric point of view. The style is lucid, informal, reader-friendly, and rich with helpful images (e.g., the complex derivative as an "amplitwist"). A truly unusual and notably creative look at a classical subject.

Ed Catmull
I was delighted when I came across Visual Complex Analysis. As soon as I thumbed through it, I realized that this was the book I was looking for ten years ago.
— (Dr. Ed Catmull, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Pixar Animation Studios [makers of Toy Story and A Bug's Life])

Product Details

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Table of Contents