ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to familiarize the reader with basic concepts in set theory and introduce our notation. The first section introduces sets of natural, rational, irrational and real numbers and provides several examples of relations. The following section considers the polynomial functions frequently used by economists, linear, quadratic and cubic, and demonstrates how to minimize a quadratic profit function (or any quadratic function for that matter). The concepts introduced in this chapter will be used frequently, so a thorough understanding of the chapter’s material is essential to the remainder of this book.
