Preliminary general material

Abstract

For the reader’s convenience, this chapter summarizes some concepts, definitions and results which are mostly relevant to the undergraduate curriculum and are thus assumed as basically known, or have specific roots in rather distant areas and have rather auxiliary character with respect to the purpose of this book, which is to push pure theory towards possible applications as fast as possible. As such, all assertions in Chapter 1 are made without proofs and the scope has been minimized to only material actually needed in the book. If a reader decides to skip this Chapter, (s)he can easily come back through references in the Index or in the text itself, if in need.