[throwaway81523]

There is no date on this but it is pretty old, since I remember thekerfluffle from probably 10+ years ago. I don't know if the NR license was ever adjusted but the software was nothing special anyway. I did learn a lot from the books, from a semi-neophyte perspective. I think serious numerics experts pooh pooh them though.

[crispyambulance]

I don't get what the big deal is. I remember this book. It was useful back in the day, but really, has anyone really ever been pinched as an NR license violator? I expect some orgs paid for licenses, it's not an exorbitant amount. It probably amounted to little more than pocket change for the professor/author over the years. Is the guy lawsuit-crazy, I didn't see evidence of that.

If some grad student, postdoc or independent uses it and doesn't quite follow the license terms, I expect nothing will happen. Though they would probably do well to update their code base, eventually, for technical as well as license reasons if they "scale up" beyond using the code for a paper or two. But the tone of the OP's call to "Boycott" is a bit over the top, RMS-style, and not in a good way.

[jwilk]

HTTP response headers say:

  Last-Modified: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 17:08:26 GMT

[pletnes]

I always had the impression that NR was about getting a broad overview of the field. I imagine each chapter covers at least a whole field of numerical research. If you’re working on applications of numerics, it is indeed important to know what’s available out there. The NR code itself I’ve never used, really.

[throwaway81523]

It's more of an intro level book, aimed at scientists rather than numerics geeks or or people into theoretical math. So it does a good job of presenting things simply and in ways that don't require navigating too many fine points. That approach mostly works, though it leaves openings for things to go wrong. The topics (root finding, integration, etc.) are similar to what you'd see in an undergrad numerics course. It specifically doesn't have anything about PDE's, since it defines that as the boundary between introductory and advanced topics.

[nereye]

FWIW, there is a whole chapter (17 in the first edition, 20 in the third/current edition, don’t have a second edition in front of me but would be surprised if it didn’t have one) on Partial Differential Equations. It’s about 50+ pages in the first edition and 70+ in the third.

But I take your point, the chapter does admit to being intended as “the briefest possible useful introduction” and notes that the topic would require another volume entirely dedicated to it.

[throwaway81523]

Ah thanks, I must have mis-remembered. I think it did say something about PDE's being the dividing line though.