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Environmental and Engineering Geoscience

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Computational Geosciences with Mathematica

(William C. Haneberg)

¹ Department of Geology, Baylor University, Waco, TX 76798-7354

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

As a young geoscientist growing up during the early expansive phase of computational geoscience, I had occasion to learn how to program in a variety of languages, from assembly language to FORTRAN, BASIC (Dartmouth BASIC, QuickBASIC, TrueBASIC, RealBASIC), Pascal, PL-1, XPL, APL, FOCUS, and so on. Today, those who write programs to support their own work tend to use programming environments like Code Warrior or higher-level languages like MATLAB, Maple and Mathematica. For example, MATLAB scripts are included in geoscience texts by Middleton (2000) and Pollard and Fletcher (2005). In recent years, the trend has been more toward using black-box applications programmed by someone else, which typically consist of either user-antagonistic freeware/shareware or quite expensive commercial packages. (The single-user license for an application that I use to make structural cross sections from surface and well data costs $35,000.)

The problem is that most geoscience students and professionals have a limited time to devote to gaining a functional knowledge of a computer language. Because Mathematica is potentially such a powerful and versatile tool for geoscientists, William Haneberg's new book Computational Geosciences with Mathematica (2005) has proven to be the most useful book that I have acquired in the last year. To my knowledge, Haneberg's book is the only text available that explains the use of Mathematica in solving a wide array of geoscience problems, although Costain and Çoruh (2004) authored a text on exploration seismology that utilizes Mathematica. I can give no higher compliment or recommendation than to state that information and ideas in Haneberg's book have led directly to several significant enhancements . . . [Full Text of this Article]