The objective of management science is to solve the decision-making problems that confront and confound managers in both the public and the private sector by developing mathe-matical models of those problems. These models have tradi-tionally been solved with various mathematical techniques, all of which lend themselves to specific types of problems. Thus, management science as a field of study has always been inherently mathematical in nature, and as a result sometimes complex and rigorous. When I began writing the first edition of this book in 1979, my main goal was to make these mathe-matical topics seem less complex and thus more palatable to undergraduate business students. To achieve this goal I started out by trying to provide simple, straightforward explanations of often difficult mathematical topics. I tried to use lots of examples that demonstrated in detail the funda-mental mathematical steps of the modeling and solution techniques. Although in the last two and a half decades the emphasis in management science has shifted away from strictly mathematical to mostly computer solutions, my objective has not changed. I have provided clear, concise explanations of the techniques used in management science to model problems, and provided lots of examples of how to solve these models on the computer, while still including some of the fundamental mathematics of the techniques.