ABSTRACT
The material in this book spans a fairly wide range of mathematics. It would be foolhardy to attempt to cover all the requisite knowledge and theories and hence only that relatively small subset of fundamental material is presented here so as to make the book as self-contained as possible. The purpose of this chapter is not to facilitate comprehensive understanding by a novice but rather to ensure the notations and basic concepts introduced are consistent and to remind the reader of certain fundamental results. The reader is therefore assumed to have an elementary grounding in linear algebra, real analysis, calculus, and have done at least a first course in linear and nonlinear programming. Some exposure to graph theory, vector optimization and variational inequalities would certainly be an added advantage.
