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San Antonio, Texas |
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An Introduction to Difference EquationsSaber Elaydi
In contemplating the third edition, I have had multiple objectives to achieve.
The first and foremost important objective is to maintain the accessibility
and readability of the book to a broad readership with varying mathematical
backgrounds and sophistication. More proofs, more graphs, more explanations, andmore applications are provided in this edition.
The second objective is to update the contents of the book so that the reader
stays abreast of new developments in this vital area of mathematics. Recent
results on local and global stability of one-dimensional maps are included in
Chapters 1, 4, and Appendices A and C. An extension of the Hartman--Grobman
Theorem
to noninvertible maps is stated in Appendix D. A whole new section on various
notions of the asymptoticity of solutions and a recent extension of Perron's
Second Theorem are added to Chapter 8. In Appendix E a detailed proof of
the Levin--May Theorem is presented. In Chapters 4 and 5, the reader will find the
latest results on the larval--pupal--adult flour beetle model.
The third and final objective is to better serve the broad readership of this
book by including most, but certainly not all, of the research areas in
difference equations. As more work is being published in the Journal of
Difference Equations and Applications and elsewhere, it became apparent that a
whole chapter needed to be dedicated to this enterprise. With the prodding and
encouragement of Gerry Ladas, the new Chapter 5 was born. Major
revisions of this chapter were made by Fozi Dannan, who diligently and
painstakingly rewrote part of the material and caught several errors and typos.
His impact on this edition, particularly in Chapters 1, 4, and Chapter 8 is immeasurable
and I am greatly indebted to him. My thanks go to Shandelle Henson, who wrote
a thorough review of the book and suggested the inclusion of an extension of
the Hartman--Groman Theorem, and to Julio Lopez and his student Alex Sepulveda
for their comments and discussions about the second edition.
Hardcover: $69.95 (in the United States), ISBN 0-387-23059-9. Orders may also be placed with Springer: telephone (in the United States) 800-777-4643; outside North America contact Springer.
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