Applied Mathematics for Physical Chemistry, Third Edition

For months I've been working out of old college textbooks in my efforts to refresh the mathematics I need to go back to school after a 17-year hiatus. This book is straightforward, succinct, and has a short, but helpful problem set at the end of each chapter. It doesn't go into great depth, but covers the relevant concepts with an eye to scientific calculation. There are no solutions, only answers, so if you don't get the answer, you are left to review until you understand (or identify a typo - not that I've found one yet.) Depending on your study/ learning style, this may be a disadvantage. I rather like it because it slows me down and forces me to identify and rectify gaps in understanding.

This book reteaches some very important math for phys-chem, such as applications of clarout's theorem and some basic PDE's. However, it doesn't cover the requisite statistics to understand entropy as a distribution of microstates, one of the most unintuitive parts of physics chemistry.