โ Scribed by M. D. Godfrey
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
because of imprecision in the input, far less precision will be needed in the output than the tables provide. The authors write: "AS is well known, problems of this sort arise frequently in areas as varied a s business (acceptance sampling, market testing), medicine (clinical trials), and agriculture (varietal comparisons)." That problems can arise to which the tables a r e relevant is shown by F. Yates' contribution to the discussion of the Grundy-Healy-Rees paper. It would be interesting to hear of other examples. The baffling thing about decision problems is their great variety, even after many simplifying assumptions have been made. The authors mention medical trials. In some of these, the cost of experimentation depends more on the number of patients who fare ill than on the total number treated. In some, again; the length of time during which the terminal decision is effective depends both on which decision is made and on the value of the parameter p, and these dependences can turn a linear loss function into a nonlinear one. Sometimes the size of the second sample can be determined sequentially. And so on, with many variations. Few decision problems involving design have been explored in detail, and little is known about simplifying assumptions. Understanding of one problem may help greatly with others. This book represents a solid achievement that should ultimately prove very valuable, whatever its immediate usefulness (which may, indeed, be considerable). F. J. Anscombe ELEMENTS OF NUMERICAL ANALYSIS, by Peter Henrici (John Wiley and Sons, New This text deserves to become the text for a required advanced undergraduate course in York, 1964), pp. 328.
a large, and increasing, number of fields. Now that large scale computational facilities are generally available, and are used by an increasing variety of scholars, the need for sound education in numerical methods is extremely acute.
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