This book goes further than providing the means of making decisions, it also offers plenty of good advice through the use of mathematics and those who wish to use this book who are not mathematically inclined may wish to revise their mathematics so that they can understand the author's solutions. The recommendation should be that a good first year university course on mathematics is desirable, in particular, a revision of the basic calculus. That said, the author does use examples that are understandable. He relies on a good basic knowledge not only of mathematics but also of related fields such as game theory probability and statistics from which his exercises emanate. Subsequent chapters are most enlightening with gambling providing much material for discussion. Statistics too receives an airing in the final chapters. One headed “Prophecy” provides the real application in the endeavours to find new and useful drugs. Throughout the text, we are reminded that applying these studies to real‐life cases is probably a far more complicated exercise. The author throughout does not hold back on emphasising the theme “that the real world provides a much more complex environment” in which to apply the book's strategies. Even so with so many exercises provided, the book does give practitioners a background which surely will assist them in dealing with the difficulties and problems that are encountered in the world outside this text.
The book, obviously, can be used in so many educational contexts. It provides, in many chapters, a text for beginners and offers an introduction to the subjects presented in others. Potential readers from the fields covered by this journal are again reminded that the book's aim is to attack these problems through mathematics and a good knowledge of the subject is needed to appreciate, and to be able to work through the text's many theoretical explanations, and to benefit from the numerous exercises presented.
