Summary

This book equips first-year undergraduates with the mathematical skills, facts and terminology required for degrees in economics, finance, management and business studies.

This book equips first-year undergraduates with the mathematical skills, facts and terminology required for degrees in economics, finance, management and business studies. It is especially suitable for those who did not progress past GCSE and who have had a break of at least two years from mathematics; such students often lack confidence in handling mathematical concepts so the aim of this book is to provide a basic text that focuses strongly on examples, while giving sufficient attention to the exposition of the principal constructions and theoretical results.The text starts with basic principles and leads as far as constrained optimisation, with several entry points to accommodate students with differing mathematical backgrounds. The fundamental ideas are described in the simplest mathematical terms and developed at an easy pace; the text touches on ideas, introduces them gently and then uses basic illustrative examples and exercises (with solutions) to show how these ideas may be brought to bear on problems in economics and finance.This text will serve as a handbook of mathematical techniques for first-year undergraduate in economics, finance, management science and business studies, but it will also be a useful reference for students on MBA courses.