Book excerpt: Conformal mapping is a field in which pure and applied mathematics are both involved. This book tries to bridge the gulf that many times divides these two disciplines by combining the theoretical and practical approaches to the subject. It will interest the pure mathematician, engineer, physicist, and applied mathematician. The potential theory and complex function theory necessary for a full treatment of conformal mapping are developed in the first four chapters, so the reader needs no other text on complex variables. These chapters cover harmonic functions, analytic functions, the complex integral calculus, and families of analytic functions. Included here are discussions of Green's formula, the Poisson formula, the Cauchy-Riemann equations, Cauchy's theorem, the Laurent series, and the Residue theorem. The final three chapters consider in detail conformal mapping of simply-connected domains, mapping properties of special functions, and conformal mapping of multiply-connected domains. The coverage here includes such topics as the Schwarz lemma, the Riemann mapping theorem, the Schwarz-Christoffel formula, univalent functions, the kernel function, elliptic functions, univalent functions, the kernel function, elliptic functions, the Schwarzian s-functions, canonical domains, and bounded functions. There are many problems and exercises, making the book useful for both self-study and classroom use. The author, former professor of mathematics at Carnegie-Mellon University, has designed the book as a semester's introduction to functions of a complex variable followed by a one-year graduate course in conformal mapping. The material is presented simply and clearly, and the only prerequisite is a good working knowledge of advanced calculus.