Chemical Education Today

Book & Media Reviews

Applied Mathematics for Physical Chemistry, 2nd Edition

James R. Barrante. Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1998. ix + 225 pp. ISBN 0-13-741737-3. $20.00.
Applied Mathematics for Physical Chemistry is the second edition of this text. The first appeared in 1974. The goal of this
edition is to bridge the gap between mathematical theory and its application for students being introduced to physical chem-
istry at the undergraduate level. An almost universal problem faced by undergraduate p-chem teachers is that many students
either have a weak background in the mathematical concepts and techniques required for physical chemistry, or they find it
difficult to see how their previous mathematical training applies to p-chem. This text is compact enough to function as a
supplementary resource that provides a review of or introduction to the mathematics students need to get past this hurdle
and concentrate on the essential scientific theory being presented.
The first five chapters review basic mathematics: coordinate systems, functions and graphs, logarithmic and expo-
nential functions, and differential and integral calculus. The next four chapters introduce the most important mathematical con-
cepts that form the foundation for current undergraduate physical chemistry courses: differential equations, infinite series, vector
and matrix algebra, and operators. The last two chapters are entitled “Numerical Methods and the Use of the Computer” and
Downloaded from pubs.acs.org by 120.188.81.152 on 10/02/18. For personal use only.

“Mathematical Methods in the Laboratory”. There are four appendices: a Table of Physical Constants, Integral Tables, more
detailed discussions of the transformation of the Laplacian operator to spherical polar coordinates, and Stirling’s approxima-
tion.
I think the text succeeds quite well in its intended purpose. In each chapter, the theoretical definitions and concepts are
nicely integrated with an example or two drawn from a relevant topic in chemistry. Thus the “languages” of mathematics and
chemistry are brought together so that a student will see how one is derived from the other. At the same time, the length of
each chapter is kept to a minimum. I think this is also important in that it allows a student to quickly consult a chapter for
help with a concept without being intimidated by too much information. Students are already confronted by p-chem texts
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that run between 800 and 1000 pages. A supplementary text that provides too much background or theory will make most
students feel as though they do not have the time to sift through the text to find where their own question is addressed. This
text should avoid this scenario.
Overall I would recommend that teachers of physical chemistry consider Barrante’s text for their classes. It should be
noted, though, that this is a text written for the undergraduate student at an undergraduate level. The material in the first five
chapters is all review of material they should have been exposed to in prerequisite math courses or other chemistry classes. In
a few places I think Barrante goes back a bit too far in his review of the basics (graphing functions, deriving the quadratic
equation), but this does not happen too often and is not a serious complaint. I liked the discussion of error propagation in
Chapter 12, which, by the way it was presented, should be helpful to students in many of their laboratory courses. I am not
sure how useful the section introducing computer programing concepts in Chapter 11 will be, since there are so many commer-
cial spreadsheet-type programs now available which can accomplish the same function without having students “write code”.
The 2nd edition of Barrante’s text may be compared with one other text, R. G. Mortimer’s Mathematics for Physical
Chemistry (Macmillan, 1981), when a decision about a supplementary mathematics resource is made. Mortimer’s text is some-
what longer but is also a good alternative. Some recent physical chemistry texts now provide very brief “math chapters”, which also
attempt to address this issue (McQuarrie and Simon, Physical Chemistry [University Science Books, 1997]).
Craig E. Barnes
Department of Chemistry
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-1600

610 Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 76 No. 5 May 1999 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu