Visual Complex Analysis: 25th Anniversary Edition

 
FROM THE AUTHOR:

All legitimate copies of VCA produced by Oxford University Press are crisply printed on high-quality paper.  If you obtain a shoddily printed copy, it's a fake: please return it and purchase a genuine OUP copy.

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The fundamental advance in the new 25th Anniversary Edition is that the original 501 diagrams now include brand-new captions that fully explain the geometrical reasoning, making it possible to read the work in an entirely new way―as a highbrow comic book!

The 25th Anniversary Edition also features a new Foreword by Sir Roger Penrose, as well as a new Preface by the author.

Complex Analysis is the powerful fusion of the complex numbers (involving the 'imaginary' square root of -1) with ordinary calculus, resulting in a tool that has been of central importance to science for more than 200 years.

This book brings this majestic and powerful subject to life by consistently using geometry (not calculation) as the means of explanation. The 501 diagrams of the original edition embodied geometrical arguments that (for the first time) replaced the long and often opaque computations of the standard approach, in force for the previous 200 years, providing direct, intuitive, visual access to the underlying mathematical reality.

Tristan Needham, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, University of San Francisco

Tristan Needham (son of the distinguished social anthropologist Rodney Needham) grew up in Oxford, England. He studied physics at Merton College, Oxford, before moving to the Mathematical Institute, where he enjoyed the great privilege of studying black holes under the supervision of Sir Roger Penrose. Tristan received his DPhil in 1987 and joined the faculty of the University of San Francisco in 1989. His continuing mission is to seek out new intuitive forms of understanding, and new visualizations.

He is also the author of Visual Differential Geometry and Forms: A Mathematical Drama in Five Acts.