This book is intended primarily for students on economics, business studies and management courses. It assumes very little prerequisite knowledge, so it can be read by students who have not undertaken a mathematics course for some time. The style is informal and the book contains a large number of worked examples. Students are encouraged to tackle problems for themselves as they read through each section. Detailed solutions are provided so that all answers can be checked. Consequently, it should be possible to work through this book on a self-study basis. The material is wide ranging, and varies from elementary topics such as percentages and linear equations, to more sophisticated topics such as constrained optimization of multivariate functions. The book should therefore be suitable for use on both low- and high-level quantitative methods courses. Examples and exercises are included which make use of the computer software packages Excel and Maple.

This book was first published in 1991. The prime motivation for writing it then was to try and produce a textbook that students could actually read and understand for themselves. This remains the guiding principle and the most significant change for this, the fifth edition, is in the design, rather than content. I was brought up with the fixed idea that mathematics textbooks were written in a small font with many equations crammed on to a page. However, I fully accept that these days books need to look attractive and be easy to negotiate. I hope that the new style will encourage more students to read it and will reduce the ‘fear factor’ of mathematics. In response to anonymous reviewers’ comments, I have included additional problems for several exercises together with two new appendices on implicit differentiation and Hessian matrices. Finally, I have also included the highlighted key terms at the end of each section and in a glossary at the end of the book.

The book now has an accompanying website that is intended to be rather more than just a gimmick. I hope that the commentary in the Instructor’s Manual will help tutors using the book for the first time. It also contains about a hundred new questions. Although a few of these problems are similar to those in the main book, the majority of questions are genuinely different. There are roughly two test exercises per chapter, which are graded to accommodate different levels of student abilities. These are provided on the website so that they can easily be cut, pasted and edited to suit. Fully worked solutions and marking schemes are included. Tutors can also control access. The website has a a section containing multiple-choice tests. These can be given to students for further practice or used for assessment. The multiple choice questions can be marked online with the results automatically transferred to the tutor’s markbook if desired.