Editing Numerical Recipes (section)

==History==
The first publication was in 1986 with the title,”Numerical Recipes, The Art of Scientific Computing”, containing code in both Fortran and Pascal; an accompanying book, “Numerical Recipes Example Book (Pascal)” was first published in 1985. (A preface note in “Examples" mentions that the main book was also published in 1985, but the official note in that book says 1986.) Supplemental editions followed with code in Pascal, BASIC, and C. ''Numerical Recipes'' took, from the start, an opinionated editorial position at odds with the conventional wisdom of the numerical analysis community:

{{cquote|If there is a single dominant theme in this book, it is that practical methods of numerical computation can be simultaneously efficient, clever, and — important — clear.  The alternative viewpoint, that efficient computational methods must necessarily be so arcane and complex as to be useful only in "black box" form, we firmly reject.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Press |first1=William H. |last2=Teukolsky |first2=Saul A. |last3=Vetterling |first3=William T. |last4=Flannery |first4=Brian P. |year=1986 |title=Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing |publisher=Cambridge University Press |publication-place=New York |isbn=0-521-30811-9 |chapter=Preface |page=xi |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/numericalrecipes00pres }}</ref>}}

However, as it turned out, the 1980s were fertile years for the "black box" side, yielding important libraries such as [[BLAS]] and [[LAPACK]], and integrated environments like [[MATLAB]] and [[Mathematica]]. By the early 1990s, when Second Edition versions of ''Numerical Recipes'' (with code in C, Fortran-77, and Fortran-90) were published, it was clear that the constituency for ''Numerical Recipes'' was by no means the majority of scientists doing computation, but only that slice that lived ''between'' the more mathematical numerical analysts and the larger community using integrated environments. The Second Edition versions occupied a stable role in this niche environment.<ref name="cip">Press, William H.; and Teukolsky, Saul A.; "Numerical Recipes: Does This Paradigm Have a Future?," Computers in Physics, 11, 416 (1997). [http://numerical.recipes/whp/CIPso97.ps Preprint.]</ref>

By the mid-2000s, the practice of scientific computing had been radically altered by the mature Internet and Web. Recognizing that their ''Numerical Recipes'' books were increasingly valued more for their explanatory text than for their code examples, the authors significantly expanded the scope of the book, and significantly rewrote a large part of the text. They continued to include code, still printed in the book, now in C++, for every method discussed.<ref>{{Cite book 
|last1=Press |first1=William H. 
|last2=Teukolsky |first2=Saul A. 
|last3=Vetterling |first3=William T. 
|last4=Flannery |first4=Brian P. 
|year=2007 |title=Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing |edition=3rd |publisher=Cambridge University Press |publication-place=New York |isbn=978-0-521-88068-8 |chapter=Preface to the Third Edition |page=xi }}</ref> The Third Edition was also released as an electronic book,<ref name="ThirdEdition">{{Cite book |last1=Press |first1=William H. |url=http://numerical.recipes/book/book.html |title=Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing |last2=Teukolsky |first2=Saul A. |last3=Vetterling |first3=William T. |last4=Flannery |first4=Brian P. |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2007 |isbn=978-0-521-88068-8 |edition=3rd |publication-place=New York}}</ref> eventually made available on the Web for free (with nags) or by paid or institutional subscription (with faster, full access and no nags).

In 2015 Numerical Recipes sold its historic two-letter domain name nr.com<ref>{{cite web|url=http://domaingang.com/domain-news/two-letter-domain-nr-com-sold-rebrands-to-numerical-recipes/|title=Two letter domain NR.com sold : Rebrands to Numerical.Recipes|date=14 October 2015}}</ref> and became <code>numerical.recipes</code> instead.