How is this book different from all the other fractal/chaos books on the market? Because of the emphasis on symmetry! Most fractal/chaos books are similar in the sense that they contain the same pictures. But even if you are fed up with Mandelbrot sets, you can safely open this book. You will love the fractal wallpapers.

The book is written by mathematicians, too, so it's factually correct, and has some real insight.

Just read it!

This looks like another book of cool fractal pictures, but it's much more than that. The concept of symmetry is subtle and useful in the hard sciences as well as in literature and philosophy. This book provides a solid mathematical treatment of it, with excellent graphical examples. This book is great fun for math nerds, but can also entertain a more general audience that has some interest in fractals or in visualizing mathematical concepts.

Not only is this book filled with eye-catching colorful pictures, it also does a wonderful job of explaining how they were generated. They also draw many interesting parallels between the computer-generated pictures and the structures that occur in nature or are man-made. Check out their Symmetric Chaos site at http://math.uh.edu/~chaos/Welcome.html!

Breaking Symmetry is certainly a magic term in this book. With the use of innumerable real-life examples and the use of dozens of pictures Stewart and Golubitsky try to illustrate the basic concept of the "Theory-That-Covers-Everything". Being confronted with the dissection of physical phenomenon into degrees of symmetry, gives the reader enough reason to believe that the "big theory" might ultimately be uncovered by using the mathematical tool of Breaking Symmetry. But this book also points out that scientists are still far away from reaching this ultimate goal.

The patterns discussed in this book takes you to the invisible world of quarks, then shows you the wonderful stripes on the fur of a tiger and finally let you surf the spiral-arms of our Galaxy. Clearly it gives the reader the opportunity to have a taste from more than one scientific discipline: Biology, Physic, Chemistry, Maths, they are all addressed in this book.

But be aware: you must keep yourself very alert while reading it, because the train of thought is not always easy to follow. Apart from the sometimes strange jumps, the narration is very clear and easy to understand, which will certainly enable you to get more insight into the fascinating world of symmetry.

This book really improved my understanding of what physicists are talking about when they speak of Symmetry Breaking. The book makes it possible for you to understand the underpinnings of this concept whilst doing nothing more intellectual than pouring the milk onto your breakfast cereal. Lots of good illustrations.Nothing to be frightened of in this book.

It really trys to connect everything and show that nature is not random. It lets you appreciate math in everyday life and lets you understand the intelligence of nature.

This book is not good at explaining linear algebra or differential equations. Gilbert Strang has a much better book and many math books that are specific to areas of applied math typically explain both concepts. Be prepared to use some reference books if your prof. requires this text.

The authors wrote this book for students who are new to linear algebra and differential equations. However, the book is anything but introductory. As hard as I tried, I could hardly follow the book. The explanations and examples are not very enlightening at all. The book tries to teach students how to play with MatLab, which is a bad move. I could read and type the Matlab code from the book, but I didn't learn to solve the problems by hand... Not from this book.

I used the text in a Calculus 3 course for intro to DiffEq and LinAlg. While taking the class and using this text, I ended up more confused than I started. Being new to the material, the text uses to much mathematical notation for someone not acustomed to theory or different mathematical notation. In addition, the text does not provide enough examples to help digest the material. On the plus side, the book does do a good job of incorporating basic MATLAB skills, but lacks in giving any direction on how to use MATLAB. I noticed in someone else's review they suggested Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra book...I would also; the book is much more clear on the linear algebra side and is very easy to understand and interpret. For the differential equation side, I would highly recommend Boyce/DiPrima.