An Introduction to Complex Analysis for Engineers

Michael D. Alder

Description:

These notes are intended to be of use to Third year Electrical and Electronic Engineers at the University o f W estern Australia coming to grips with Complex Function Theory. There are many text books for just this purpose, and I have insucient time to write a text book, so this is not a substitute for, say, Matthews and How-ell's Complex Analysis for Mathematics and Engineering,[1], but perhaps a complement to it. At the same time, knowing how reluctant students are to use a textbook (except as a talisman to ward o evil) I have tried to make these notes sucient, in that a student who reads them, understands them, and does the exercises in them, will be able to use the concepts and techniques in later years. It will also get the student comfortably through the examination. The shortness of the course, 20 lectures, for covering Complex Analysis, either presupposes genius (90% perspiration) on the part of the students or material skipped. These notes are intended to ll in some of the gaps that will inevitably occur in lectures. It is a source of some disappointment to me that I can cover so little of what is a beautiful subject, rich in applications and connections with other areas of mathematics. This is, then, a sort of sampler, and only touches the elements. Styles of Mathematical presentation change over the years, and what was deemed acceptable rigour by Euler and Gauss fails to keep modern purists content. McLachlan, [2], clearly smarted under the criticisms of his presentation , and he goes to some trouble to explain in later editions that the book is intended for a dierent audience from the purists who damned him. My experience leads me to feel that the need for rigour has been developed to the point where the intuitive and geometric has been stunted. Both have a part in mathematics, which grows out of the con BLOCKINict between them. But it seems to me more important to penetrate to the ideas in a sloppy, scruy but serviceable way, than to reduce a subject to predicate calculus and omit the whole reason for studying it. There is no known means of persuading a hardheaded engineer that a subject merits his time and energy when it has been turned into an elaborate game. He, or increasingly she, wants to see two elements at an early …