Numerical analysis

Numerical analysis is concerned with the development, analysis, and use of algorithms that simulate physical and social processes. It is a practical science, involving as it does the production of numbers that approximate the solution of mathematical models of physical and social systems. It is a very old science. Many famous mathematicians from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--including Gauss, Newton, and Fourier--developed numerical algorithms that are still widely used. The advent of computers provided a tremendous impetus to the study and development of numerical analysis, and indeed led to so many new advances that it is now common to refer to the period from 1950 to the present as the era of "modern numerical analysis." High-speed computers have made it possible to solve ever more complex problems and, as a result, to gain much better insight into complex processes. Modern technological achievements in such areas as space and atomic energy would have been impossible without high-speed computers and advances in numerical analysis.