It is an incontestable fact that numerical analysis techniques are used
rou- tinely (although not always effectively) in virtually every
quantitative field of scientific endeavor. In this book, which is
directed toward upper-division and graduate level students in
engineering and mathematics, we have selected for discussion subjects
that are traditionally found in numerical analysis texts. But our choice
of methodology rejects the traditional where analysis and experience
clearly warrant such a departure, and one of our primary aspirations in
this work is to equip the reader with the wherewithal to apply numerical
analysis thinking to nontraditional subjects. For there is a plethora of
computer-oriented sciences such as optimization, statistics, and system
analysis and identification that are sorely in need of methods
comparable to those related here for classical numerical analysis
problems. Toward uncovering for the reader the structure of numerical
methods we have, for example, devoted a chapter to a metric space theory
for iter- ative application of operators. In this chapter, we have
collected those definitions and concepts of real and functional analysis
that are requisite to a modern intermediate-level exposition of the
principles of numerical anal- ysis. Further, we derive the abstract
theory (most notably, the contraction mapping theorem) for iteration
processes.