Catatan

The original motivation for writing this book was rather personal. The first author, in the course of his teaching career in the Department of Pure Math-ematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS), University of Cambridge,and St John’s College, Cambridge, had many painful experiences when good (or even brilliant) students, who were interested in the subject of mathemat-ics and its applications and who performed well during their first academic year, stumbled or nearly failed in the exams. This led to great frustration, which was very hard to overcome in subsequent undergraduate years. A con-scientious tutor is always sympathetic to such misfortunes, but even pointing out a student’s obvious weaknesses (if any) does not always help. For the second author, such experiences were as a parent of a Cambridge University student rather than as a teacher.