Mathematics for modelling and inferenceRung 1 · Introductory

Most papers on body weight carry a few equations, and most readers skip them. The argument is often in those lines. Book 0 named the derivative and the integral and asked you to work out neither. This book asks you to work them out, on body stores rather than on made-up curves. It adds the few tools that the equations in these papers keep using: tables of numbers multiplied together, the arithmetic of chance, and the point where a changing system stops changing.

Read Book 0 and Book 1 first, or at least the sections this book names as it goes. Then read this one in order: each section assumes everything before it. Do the practice problems in each section before you read on, with a pen and a calculator. Keep a notebook open as you go. By the end it should hold ten equations from papers you have read, each written out in words. What this book does not teach yet: the product and chain rules, partial derivatives, likelihood, confidence intervals, hypothesis tests, regression and causal inference. Later books in the series take them up; “inference” in the title is where this subject’s rungs are heading.