Product Description

Numerical ability is an essential skill for everyone studying the biological sciences but many students are frightened by the ′perceived′ difficulty of mathematics, and are nervous about applying mathematical skills in their chosen field of study. Having taught introductory maths and statistics for many years, Alan Cann understands these challenges and just how invaluable an accessible, confidence building textbook could be to the fearful student. Unable to find a book pitched at the right level, that concentrated on why numerical skills are useful to biologists, he wrote his own. The result is Maths form Scratch for Biologists , a highly instructive, informal text that explains step by step how and why you need to tackle maths within the biological sciences.

Features:

∗ An accessible, jargon–busting approach to help readers master basic mathematical, statistical and data handling techniques in biology
∗ Numerous end of chapter problems to reinforce key concepts and encourage students to test their newly acquired skills through practise
∗ A handy, time–saving glossary
∗ A supplementary website with numerous problems and self–test exercises

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #142692 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From the Back Cover
Numerical ability is an essential skill for everyone studying the biological sciences, but many students are frightened by the ′perceived′ difficulty of mathematics, and are nervous about applying mathematical skills in their chosen field of study. Having taught introductory maths and statistics for many years, Alan Cann understands these challenges, and is aware just how invaluable an accessible, confidence building, textbook could be to the fearful student. Unable to find a book pitched at the right level, that concentrated on why numerical skills are useful to biologists, he wrote his own. The result is Maths from Scratch for Biologists, a highly instructive, informal text that explains step by step how and why you need to tackle maths within the biological sciences.

Features:

Customer Reviews

Not sufficient on its own
I purchased this book after borrowing it from the library since it has lots of examples and exercises. I used it in conjunction with "Algebra for Dummies" (which is excellent) in my first year as an undergraduate. The book is useful for revision but I have not used it as much as the 'Dummies' book. I feel that some of the explanations suffer through over-simplification and the chapters on statistics are not sufficient without deeper books for reference. I've found it necessary to go elsewhere to learn the fundamentals needed to understand some of the content presented here. When I bought this book I was expecting it to be the other way round.

Hard to recommend
I would find it hard to recommend this book. On several occasions, I'm left wondering whether it's me or the author who has misunderstood.

For example, the author notes that always rounding numbers like 2.45 up (to 2.5) introduces statistical bias, and prefers a variant of the "round to even" method, which in this case means rounding down to 2.4. Fair enough, but he also rounds down in cases like 2.459, which he would round to 2.4, even though it's clearly closer to 2.5. I'm left wondering what the real justification for this is.

Another example: the author gives two methods of calculating percentiles; the first of these seems to assume that the distribution is perfectly flat, yet this isn't explicitly stated. Again, I'm left wondering whether it's me or the author who has misunderstood.