What Very Big Teeth You Have

fit this body of work into a volume only a half-inch thick—far slimmer than most biology textbooks. Its small size and completeness make it best suited as a desk reference or as a set of lecture notes for highly mathematically trained graduate-level students in a bioengineering class. Its style is a mixture of formal and informal, in the manner of the most-effective engineering teachers. The derivations and proofs are quite formal, as they should be, but in the examples given, the author inserts numerous caveats. At times, one can almost hear Grodzinsky speaking, a seasoned practitioner of biomathematics imparting his years of experience. It is noteworthy that the author compromises neither on the rigor of the mathematics nor on the biological and chemical aspects of its application. Other interdisciplinary texts in bioengineering usually present simplified equations with the absence of vector notation. Grodzinsky’s book, by comparison, is most thorough and complete in its mathematical presentation. Units are given for all variables throughout the text, which aid the reader in understanding the material. Moreover, mathematical tools are taught alongside stunning microscopy images, tables of chemical formulas, and properties of the most important biomolecules and schematic diagrams of the problem at hand. This biological data will save the reader hours of Internet surfing and page turning through other texts. Exciting examples of electromechanics, such as an analysis of the electric eel or of magnetically driven bone healing, distinguish this book from rigorous mathematics texts. Numerous images also provide a historical tour of recent bioengineering inventions, such as electrophoresis and microelectromechanical systems. The inclusion of photos of certain instruments, however, may date the text as the number and sophistication of bioengineering technologies advances. Similar to many books used at MIT, this one has a strong mathematics prerequisite. To fully appreciate Fields, references to other textbooks that are less mathematical in nature. Fields, Forces, and Flows will be most appreciated by those students with electrical engineering backgrounds who will be graduating within the next 10 years. For this audience, the book is an excellent and concise example of an interdisciplinary text on mathematical methods in bioengineering. Not only does the book present all the laws of electromechanics in a single place but it brags justifiably about the numerous applications of these laws in bioengineering technologies. It is historically relevant to note that Grodzinsky’s doctoral advisor, James Melcher, was an MIT electrical engineer known for rediscovering and popularizing the entire field of continuum electromechanics and its application. In some ways, Grodzinsky is this century’s Melcher, resurrecting electromechanics for the second time and showing clearly and inspiringly its successful application to bioengineering problems.