Lorenzo Peccati

This book is aimed at students in social sciences programs that include some course in quantitative methods. Stats for social sciences is frequently the subject of textbooks, while maths for social sciences is often neglected: monographs on specific themes (like, for instance, social choice systems or game theory applications) are available, but they do not adequately cover the topic in general. This textbook stems from the Bocconi University’s new "Bachelor in Government", which was launched in 2015, and is intended for undergraduate students who do not exclude maths from their toolbox. It discusses various concrete applications in political economics, political science, sociology, and demography and explores topics like Grexit, Macron’s success, immigration effects and the Arab Spring.

This textbook is tailored for those educational programs, such as Economics and Management, that include an introductory (and frequently the only) course in Mathematics. The volume focuses on a number of selected, fundamental topics: the knowledge of Calculus, for functions of one and two variables; the use of Calculus in optimization; the notion of integral for functions of one variable; the language and the elementary techniques of Linear Algebra; the basics of Financial Calculus. Several preliminary examples from applied sciences (mainly from Economics) introduce the theoretical aspects. An excessive formalism is avoided, in order to quickly reach the fundamental concepts. Mybook contains the solutions to the end-of-chapter exercises.