ABSTRACT
To keep the book self-contained, in this chapter we review the basic mathematics and algorithmics that is required to understand and appreciate the material in the remainder of the book. To give a context to some of the abstract ideas involved, we follow a storyline. This is also an exercise in understanding an application, abstracting the essence of the task at hand, formulating the computational problem and designing and analyzing an algorithm for solving the computational problem. The last (but certainly not the least) part of the task is to implement the algorithm and analyze its performance in a real world setting.
