Software Engineering Mathematics

Mathematics is a way of describing things that permits exact reasoning about some of the properties. The properties you cannot reason about are abstracted away in the descriptive process. The trick of abstracting to get important properties, the preciseness required of the descriptions, and the careful steps in the reasoning about properties are the skills you have to learn to do mathematics. To use mathematics is another matter. For that you need is to understand somebody else's description well enough to apply it. Here "apply" means to describe how the model fits what you are working on and then use existing features of the model to check properties you care about. Traditional engineering is about using mathematics. Software engineering is more about doing mathematics. The reason for this difference is that traditional engineering applies well worn practices and software engineering is almost always involved in creating something quite different than what came before. A good book on software engineering mathematics will, like this one, teach you a descriptive process as it teaches you the traditional mathematical concepts. The descriptive framework covered by this book is called Z. It came out of Britain and is pronounced "zed". It is way under utilized in the U.S. but for an American book written from a more applied point of view see "The way of Z" by Jonathan Jacky. Some of you may have to read that before you find this one interesting. I used to teach a graduate course in discrete structures to masters students in computer science. Had I been aware of this book then, I would have used it as a text.