Chapter 1
Introduction and Prerequisites

This document is based on a summary of the main mathematical results of the course initially prepared by Graham Shaw. I hope they have turned into a reasonably complete guide to the material presented in the course, and in an accurate form!

I would suggest you come back to this reasonably often, as this is always very much a work in progress. Please let me know if you find any typos or slips, so I can fix them.

This is not intended to be an absolutely complete set of notes, and thus do not be surprised if some derivations and examples of applying the results are not given, or are very much abbreviated. Of course, this does not imply you do not need to be able to derive or apply these results. Nor need you necessarily memorise very complicated equations, just because they are included here. Common sense must be applied; use of good textbooks next to these notes is advisable!

There are many different ways to remember mathematics and much of physics. One that I find quite useful is to understand a number of the key principles underlying this work, so that you can derive most results quickly. Combined with practise from both the example sheets and additional material as can be found in the textbooks, should prepare you quite well for this course.

 1.1 Prerequisites