First and foremost, this book is dedicated to Dr. Allen Emerson, my co-author and long-time friend, who passed away during the completion of this project. His hard work, tenacious intellect, and willingness try new ideas made this book possible. Our spouses also deserve a great deal of the credit for this work. Cheryl Forbes teaches writing and rhetoric, and her influence on Allen’s approach to teaching mathematics was enormous. My wife, Brenda, has had a prfound influence on my approach to teaching overall and on helping me understand the business world enough to bring a new approach to mathematics into it. Both of them put up with our tendencies to lose sight of everything but this project, at times spending upwards of twelve straight hours a day trying to understand student learning in the course we wrote this book to support.
We would also like to thank Anne Geraci for her invaluable assistance. She has provided enormous editorial support in reviewing the materials and helping to prepare this updated edition of the textbook. Any errors, typos, or omissions are entirely due to our work and not her excellent reviewing of the material.
I would also like to thank Carol Freeman, the department of Mathematical and Computing Sciences at St. John Fisher College, and the School of Business at Fisher. They have provided us with opportunities to try new approaches to an old course and have supported our ideas, no matter how strange they seemed. The course we designed, and ultimately, the textbook we wrote, would also not have been possible without the assistance of many adjunct faculty members who helped us with suggestions, revisions and ideas: Mike Rotundo, Rebecca Tiffin, and Mary Ann Cape.
In addition, Ginger James provided us with invaluable assistance in the early years of the course, attending class, tutoring students, and offering suggestions while still an undergraduate at St. John Fisher College. We have also benefited from the able tutoring of several undergraduates, and thank all of them for their assistance in supporting the course.