This book is dedicated to preparing prospective college students for the study of mathematics. It can be used at the end of high school or during the first year of college, for personal study or for introductory courses. It aims to set a meeting between two relatives who rarely speak to each other: the Mathematics of Beauty, which shows up in some popular books and films, and the Mathematics of Toil, which is widely known. Toil can be overcome through an appropriate method of work. Beauty will be found in the achievement of a way of thinking. The first part concerns the mathematical language: the expressions "for all", "there exists", "implies", "is false", ...; what is a proof by contradiction; how to use indices, sums, induction. The second part tackles specific difficulties: to study a definition, to understand an idea and apply it, to fix a slightly wrong argument, to discuss suggestions, to explain a proof. The third part presents customary techniques and points of view in college mathematics. The reader can choose one of three difficulty levels (A, B, C).

Hoermander operators are a class of linear second order partial differential operators with nonnegative characteristic form and smooth coefficients, which are usually degenerate elliptic-parabolic, but nevertheless hypoelliptic, that is highly regularizing. The study of these operators began with the 1967 fundamental paper by Lars Hoermander and is intimately connected to the geometry of vector fields.Motivations for the study of Hoermander operators come for instance from Kolmogorov-Fokker-Planck equations arising from modeling physical systems governed by stochastic equations and the geometric theory of several complex variables. The aim of this book is to give a systematic exposition of a relevant part of the theory of Hoermander operators and vector fields, together with the necessary background and prerequisites.The book is intended for self-study, or as a reference book, and can be useful to both younger and senior researchers, already working in this area or aiming to approach it.

This book is dedicated to preparing prospective college students for the study of mathematics. It can be used at the end of high school or during the first year of college, for personal study or for introductory courses. It aims to set a meeting between two relatives who rarely speak to each other: the Mathematics of Beauty, which shows up in some popular books and films, and the Mathematics of Toil, which is widely known. Toil can be overcome through an appropriate method of work. Beauty will be found in the achievement of a way of thinking. The first part concerns the mathematical language: the expressions "for all", "there exists", "implies", "is false", ...; what is a proof by contradiction; how to use indices, sums, induction. The second part tackles specific difficulties: to study a definition, to understand an idea and apply it, to fix a slightly wrong argument, to discuss suggestions, to explain a proof. The third part presents customary techniques and points of view in college mathematics. The reader can choose one of three difficulty levels (A, B, C).