For the last five and a half years I have been editing and writing The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics. I’m pleased to announce that the project is at the final stage, with the PDF file delivered to Princeton University Press and the book scheduled for publication in September 2015.
Over the coming months I will produce a variety of posts on this blog about the book. The book also has a Twitter feed, @ThePCAM, which will contain relevant news and links.
What does The Companion do? Briefly, it
- introduces applied mathematics and its history, and explains what applied mathematicians do,
- describes key concepts and equations, functions, and laws,
- describes the main areas of current research,
- presents a selection of mathematical modelling problems,
- gives short examples of applied mathematics problems,
- describes applications at the interface with other areas, and
- covers general aspects of writing, teaching and promoting mathematics.
Here are some statistics:
| Pages | xvii + 994 + 16 color plates |
| Articles | 186 |
| Authors | 165 from 23 countries |
| Figures | 196 monochrome + 23 colour |
| Cross references | 751 |
| Index | 2842 entries over 33 pages |
The target audience for The Companion is mathematicians at undergraduate level or above, students, researchers, and professionals in other subjects who use mathematics, and mathematically interested lay readers. Some articles will also be accessible to students studying mathematics at pre-university level.
The book was edited by me and associate editors
- Mark Dennis (University of Bristol)
- Paul Glendinning (University of Manchester)
- Paul Martin (Colorado School of Mines)
- Fadil Santosa (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis)
- Jared Tanner (University of Oxford)
Copy editing, typesetting, and project management were done by Sam Clark (T&T Productions, London), and the indexer was Julie Shawvan. The Princeton University Press editors were Anne Savarese and Vickie Kearn. For an interview with Vickie, see The Science of Loving Math.
The Companion already has pages on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk from which it can be pre-ordered, and it is in the Fall 2015 PUP catalogue (page 62).
Here is a word cloud for the book, generated using Wordle (also available in a high resolution PDF version):
Nick Higham 
I just preordered a copy. Sounds like an impressive piece of work with an equally impressive index! http://blogs.siam.org/a-call-for-better-indexes/