This book is the culmination of a set of notes that has been growing and fermenting in a bottom drawer of my desk for over 30 years. The goal was that after the right amount of pedantic aging, they would be ready to uncork the bottle and share with the world. It is my hope that the finished product harbors the perfect blend of intuition and rigorous preciseness, theory versus pragmatism, hard‐nosed mathematics, and an enjoyable learning experience.

I must confess that when the entrails of this book were taking form, the intended audience was the 25 or so students in my Introduction to Higher Math class, but now that they have been released into the wild, my hope is they will find a wider audience.