Mathematical Modeling in the Environment

Rating:
Summary: Not Good as Primary Text
Review: I used this as the text for a course in Mathematical Models and Applications, and I do not recommend that other teachers use it. I spent an average of somewhere between 5 and 10 hours per presentation (the class met three times per week) and that wasn't enough. The book's background information on groundwater, air quality, and hazardous materials was enough to get me started, but I found I had to spend a lot of time learning environmental information not covered in the book. I also spent an incredible amount of time constructing homework and exam problems. The book really isn't all that bad, and can serve well as an introduction to the subject for a college teacher who wants to learn something about this, but as a primary text it requires way too much preparation time on the part of the teacher, especially at an institution with a heavy teaching load. (I had an 11-hour teaching load.) By the way, the hazardous materials program used by the authors of the text, ARCHIE, is being phased out, and information about it is hard to obtain. (It doesn't even run on some modern computer systems.) Its replacement, CAMEO, currently has serious installation problems. It isn't all that hard to get around them on your own computer, but installation on computers in a lab may be a different story. Dave Trautman, The Citadel, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

Rating:
Summary: A very interesting textbook for an interdisciplinary course.
Review: In the Spring of 2001, I used this book to teach a new course on mathematical modeling of environmental issues. I found this book to be a fascinating reading and wished to share it with students. The book's approach to environmental problems, and to their mathematical modeling, and the pedagogical suggestions given in the accompanying Instructor Manual, provided me with an excellent source for setting up an unusual and very successful mathematics course.
The book presents an in-depth introduction to several environmental issues of contemporary relevance, such as grounwater contamination, air pollution,and hazardous material handling.The students are exposed to most interdisciplinary aspects of the problems encountered. These aspects include social and ethical considerations,business, law and political implications, and the scientific side represented by chemistry, physics, geology and mathematics.Mathematical models are introduced as the natural machinery necessary for finding solutions to the quantitative aspects of the environmental problems. As such, even sophisticated models of air pollution, are accepted by students, with very little mathematical background,with a high degree of competence and enjoyment.Just as naturally, computers are being used to understand the implications of the mathematical modeling. That is, computers are used to carry out heavy computations and graph data (MS EXCEL), and to analyze case scenarios' danger zones in case of hazardous materials accidents. The later uses a risk analysis program which comes with the book, ARCHIE. ARCHIE is an interactive, user friendly DOS program which runs nicely once it is properly installed. It is a little tricky "fooling" the Windows environment into installing and running ARCHIE. I e-mailed Charles Hadlock, and he was very helpful talking me and the people at the Computer Lab through the installation.
The course requires a substantial amount of preparation to set it up initially, but this is to be expected for a course of such substantial interdisciplinary richeness.The instructor needs to become familiar with new software, read a little about environmental issues in an environmental science book, surf the Internet for relevant sites, and think how to teach the unfamiliar non-mathematical aspects of the course. All this work more them pays off in terms of what you end up offering the students, and their enthusiastic response. I am using this book again this semester. It is much easier and the students are just as enthusistic.
If you want to set up a course where mathematics is involved in solving some of the world's major problems in a natural and interesting way, I highly recommend that you use this book.
Sarah Glaz, Professor of Mathematics, University of Connecticut.