ABSTRACT
Readers of psychometric literature often find their progress hindered by a lack of familiarity with the mathematical language of the discipline. Although a mastery of complex mathematics is not necessary to gain a basic understanding of various psychometric theories, knowledge of the conceptual nature of some of the mathematical and statistical tools—beyond introductory statistics—used frequently in psychometrics will facilitate an understanding of the logic of various measurement theories. In this chapter, relevant features of quadratic functions, derivatives, optimization algorithms, Bayesian statistics, and linear algebraic analogs of matrix algebra are reviewed in very general conceptual terms.
