Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians of all time, introduced the notion of a vector to define the existence of gravitational forces, the motion of the planets around the sun, and the motion of the moon around the earth. Vector calculus is a fundamental scientific tool that allows us to investigate the origins and evolution of space and time, as well as the origins of gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear forces. Vector calculus is an essential language of mathematical physics, and plays a vital role in differential geometry and studies related to partial differential equations widely used in physics, engineering, fluid flow, electromagnetic fields, and other disciplines. Vector calculus represents physical quantities in two or three-dimensional space, as well as the variations in these quantities.
The machinery of differential geometry, of which vector calculus is a subset, is used to understand most of the analytic results in a more general form. Many topics in the physical sciences can be mathematically studied using vector calculus techniques.
This book is designed under the assumption that the readers have no prior knowledge of vector calculus. It begins with an introduction to vectors and scalars, and also covers scalar and vector products, vector differentiation and integrals, Gauss's theorem, Stokes's theorem, and Green's theorem. The MATLAB programming is given in the last chapter.
This book includes many illustrations, solved examples, practice examples, and multiple-choice questions.
Professor Shah received her PhD in Statistics from Gujarat University in 1994. From February 1990 until now Professor Shah has been Head of the Department of Mathematics in Gujarat University, India. She is a post-doctoral visiting research fellow of University of New Brunswick, Canada. Professor Shah’s research interests include inventory modeling in supply chains, robotic modeling, mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, image processing, dynamical systems and their applications, etc. She has published 13 monograph, 5 textbooks, and 475+ peer-reviewed research papers. Four edited books have been prepared for IGI-global and Springer with coeditor Dr. Mandeep Mittal. Her papers are published in high-impact journals such as those published by Elsevier, Interscience, and Taylor and Francis. According to Google scholar, the total number of citations is over 3334 and the maximum number of citations for a single paper is over 177. She has guided 28 PhD Students and 15 MPhil students. She has given talks in USA, Singapore, Canada, South Africa, Malaysia, and Indonesia. She was Vice-President of the Operational Research Society of India. She is Vice-President of the Association of Inventory Academia and Practitioner and a council member of the Indian Mathematical Society.
Dr Panchal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Sciences and Humanities, Parul University, India. He has 7+ years of teaching experience and 5+ years of research experience. His research interests are in the fields of mathematical control theory applied to various types of impulsive and/or fractional differential inclusions/systems with non-local conditions, and integer/fractional-order mathematical modeling of dynamical systems based on real-life phenomena. His 10 articles have been published in international journals indexed in SCIE, Scopus and Web of Science.
