Numerical Recipes
Numerical recipes is the generic term for the following three books, all by William Press, Saul Teukolsky, William Vetterling and Brian Flannery:
- Numerical recipes in C++
- Numerical recipes in C
- Numerical recipes in Fortran
The full title is "Numerical recipes in <whatever>: the art of scientific computing". The books are now in their second edition, to which this article refers.
The books contain an enormous amount of material on computational methods, and an accompanying disk includes a large amount of computer code and several libraries.
Numerical recipes is notable for its accessibility and general not-too-serious tone. The emphasis is on the understanding of techniques (the authors repeatedly state their suspicion of blackbox technqiues). Many of the algorithms presented emphasise clarity and practicality as the primary desiderata. From the preface to the first edition:
<quote> The alternative viewpoint, that efficient computational methods must necessarily be so arcane and complex as to be useful only in "black box" form, we firmly reject </quote>
The series has attracted a great deal of acclaim and criticism. Acclaim typically focusses on the clear explanations and wide applicability of the methods.
It is inevitable that a book of this scope and importance (the books' sales figures are very high) will attract criticism. Negative criticism of the books, almost without exception, has one or more of the following characteristics:
- It is nonspecific
- It is anonymous
- It is unsupported by citations or reference to "better" techniques
- Assertions of "efficiency" are not quantitative
- It cites numerous "bugs" that have long since been corrected
- It claims something like "serious scholars have long since derided <some NR algorithm that is not explicitly named> and now "modern techniques" are in use, all without specific citations
- It claims something like "the book seems OK at first glance but serious analysis of 'my specialist area' shows that at least this part of the book is deficient"
As such, much of the negative criticism of the book has much in common with urban myth or pseudoscience.