Gregory V. Bard

Associate Professor of Mathematics
Preserving the look-and-feel of the World Wide Web as it was, in 1998.
Home... Cryptograms... Sage-Related Stuff... Fractal Broccoli... Cost of Skipping Class...
Biography... Finite Math... LaTeX Help... Mandelbrot Set... Books I've Written...
Publications... Courses Taught... Favorite Quotes... Interactive Apps... Global Hits Tracker...

: : : : : : : Looking to download Sage for Undergraduates for free? (click here) : : : : : : :

Books that I've Written


This webpage contains a collection of links pertaining to the books that I have written:

  1. My newest project is called Discrete Structures: a problem-solving approach. This electronic textbook-in-progress is available at www.discrete-math-hub.com and is (roughly) half completed.

  2. Here are some links for my book Sage for Undergraduates (363 pages), published by The American Mathematical Society in February of 2015.
    • Graciously, the AMS has permitted me to place a pdf file of the book on my webpage.
    • Here is a link to the black-and-white version.
    • Here is a link to the color version.
    • The online electronic appendix covers plotting in color, complex functions, and 3D graphics. Those subjects are not suited to a black-and-white book, and therefore cannot be printed inside the book itself. [Rough Draft] Click here.
    • Chapter 6 of the book teaches the reader how to make their own interactive webpages or applets. To save readers from having to retype my code into their computers, I provide a zip-file with all source code of the examples used.
    • An index for the Sage for Undergraduates book is available as a pdf file. Compiled by Tahnee Cooper of Rockhurst University, this PDF index, when printed out, can be trimmed with scissors and tucks nicely into the back cover as a handy reference.

  3. The textbook Finite and Financial Mathematics was a work in progress from January of 2010 until May of 2017. I have time-capsuled this project, and while I will not delete it, I am not sure that I shall ever complete it. The book was intended for the university freshmen-level math course for students majoring in business, marketing, economics, management, accounting, finance, international business, tourism, property management and similar subjects, intended to cover everything those students need to know, up to but not including calculus. You can see samples by clicking here. The projected length was 1100-1200 pages. Using the spyware built into UW Stout's course management software (Desire2Learn, or D2L), I was able to determine that 80% of my students were ignoring both my materials and those by other authors. (To be explicit, only 20% of the students were even opening the files at all.) I very much regret wasting multiple years of my life writing a textbook for a community of students that are totally unwilling to read any textbook by any author. ;-(

  4. Algebraic Cryptanalysis (386 pages) was published by Springer in 2009. This is a graduate-level monograph aimed at helping new PhD students approach the research topic of cryptanalysis. The book has its own webpage and is available on amazon.com. I had the privilege of teaching from that book in Beijing, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute for Mathematics Mechanization, during the Summer of 2010.

  5. My PhD dissertation, Algorithms for Solving Linear and Polynomial Systems of Equations over Finite Fields with Applications to Cryptanalysis, (181 pages) is available by clicking here.

  6. Though I seldom mention it in public, prior to all of this, when I was a PhD student, I had a project titled Mathematics, It's Not Just Calculus which was a 14-author team effort that I had created. I had invited each of my friends to write a chapter on a topic that they knew very well (e.g. Group Theory, Game Theory, Graph Theory, Ring Theory, Matrix Algebra, etc...) that was not part of calculus. The intended audience would have been senior high-school students who wanted to become math majors in college. The project was excessively ambitious and coordinating the efforts of so many authors (with their distinct voices) proved troublesome. We did hit a page-count of 574 (!) pages before we all gave up. Not every project can be a success! :-(

There you have it. One work in progress, three successes, and two failures. Nonetheless, I have learned from my failures.


If you like, you may contact me at this address, which a human will have no trouble understanding:

gregory dot bard at ieee dot org


Last updated July 31st, 2018.
Stats