This popular text provides students with hands-on modeling skills for a wide variety of problems involving differential equations that describe rates of change. This edition includes updated Maple and MATLAB code as well as new case studies and exercises. The text focuses on growth and decay processes, interacting populations, and heating/cooling problems. It carefully details the process of constructing a model. It uses flow diagrams and word equations to aid in the model-building process and to develop the mathematical equations.

B. Barnes is a director in the Australian Government Research Bureau and a visiting fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, Canberra. She has published work in a number of applied areas, such as bifurcation theory, population dynamics, carbon sequestration, biological processes, and disease transmission.

G.R. Fulford was recently a research associate and senior lecturer in applicable mathematics at the Queensland University of Technology. He has published several textbooks on mathematical modeling and industrial mathematics as well as other work in areas, such as mucus transport, spermatozoa propulsion, infectious disease modeling, tuberculosis in possums, tear-flow dynamics in the eye, and population genetics.