Schaum's Outline Introduction to Mathematical Economics,   ISBN:9780071358965

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I received the book in good time and received very good service from the company. I would do business with them again.

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This book is straight to the point, the concepts are mainly explained through examples as well as walk-though excercises.

This is an upper-undergraduate or even graduate book on this topic, and so it assumes you know some algebra beforehand, but technically no prior knowledge of calculus is needed.
This book is on the same level as Chiang's book 'Fundamental methods--'.

You could learn from this book as a complete beginner as long as you do all the excercises and repeat each chapter until you know everything fluently. But this book is probably best used for revision or as complementary material.

There are no actual exercises in the book, only solved problems.
You can still use these as excercises though, just cover up the explained bit and try it yourself first.

The "excercises" in each chapter start out easy for each topic introduced, and then increase in difficulty, this means that you can adjust what you learn according to what your own abilities and goals are.
The applied excercises cover both microeconomics and macroeconomics, I think the proportion of each was very good.

I need to mention that some of the chapters on the economic applications require prior knowledge of intermediate macro & microeconomic Theory.
You need to know the economic concepts beforehand, as this book will not teach you that.

This book covers roughly the same content as Chiang's book.
But there are two major differences, one in methodology and one in presentation:
1. methodology; Chiang prefers to explain through words, Dowling through examples
2. presentation: Chiang is very formal/general in presenting his formulae - it's the type of math you see in journals, Dowling is more specific in his formulae - the type you see mostly in textbooks and is easier to work with

In my view, Chiang's book tends to focus more on microeconomic applications and less on macro, Dowling has a more even distribution.

For revision my preference is with this Schaum-book, it is much easier to look things up in this book - which is why it works so well as a reference and revision book.
With Chiang's book you can't really do that as the text "get's in the way".

Customer Rating: 

I bought this book as a supplement to my econometrics course. It is fantasic. It had been a few semesters since I'd taken my calculus and statistics courses and this really helped me brush up on the mathematical side of econometrics (pretty much the entire course...) This book was very helpful, to the point where I am now going to purchase 4 more books on various topics for review. This is a great choice and the range of topics covered is most comprehensive.

Customer Rating: 

This is a very useful book for undergrad and graduate students in the fields of Economics and Business. For each topic, the author presents the basics of theory and then proposes several different exercises. The solutions are shown in detail which clearly helps the reader in terms of understanding the path and the reasoning behind a specific solution.

The book can be divided into six parts:
I - Introduction: chapters 1 and 2. In here the author discusses the basics you are going to need across the entire book: simultaneous equations, functions, polynomials, linear and quadratic equations.

II - Differentiation: Chapters 3 to 9. Differentiation is the key issue in this set of chapters: it is important to stress that the author included multivariable analysis (Lagrange Multipliers for instance) which adds a desirable complexity to the issues that are under discussion;

III - Linear Algebra: chapters 10 to 13. In this part, the author presents the most relevant topics in this field such as matrix inversion, determinants, eigen values and concave programming;

IV - Integration: chapters 14 and 15. The author provides a good explanation of the main integration techniques and he analyses the indefinite and the definite integral and its aplications;

V - Differential Equations and Difference Equations: chapters 16 to 19. This part includes first-order differential and difference equations, second-order differential and difference equations and simultaneous differential and difference equations. This part and the next can be consider as the most challenging issues in the entire book. I consider that as long as the reader was able to follow the reasoning and the methodologies that were used in the previous parts, these last chapters will be a very interesting challenge.

VI - Dynamic Optimization: chapters 20 and 21. The book ends with calculus of variations and otimal control theory.

As a Professor of Mathematics for Social Sciences I believe this is one of the best books available. Probably it will be important to have another book, like, for instance, Chiang, as a theoretical complement. But this book can really gets you into the wonders and logic of mathematical reasoning and mathematical tools.

Customer Rating: 

I took 6 courses in economics in college but this book took me further than Managerial Economics did as it discussed some topics not in my college courses.